NOTES, &c. (continued 4)

[It has been an intense delight to come upon these and the other words and thoughts of Eliza W. Farnham; 215“blazes” or axe-marks of this previous pioneer in the same exploration. It is only since completing the whole of the verses that the writer has found the passages quoted from Mrs. Farnham’s work, and deduces a not unnatural confirmation of the mutually shared views, from the singular concord and unanimity of their expression.]

8.—“... supreme of form and will.”

“The changes that have come over us in our social life during the past two decades are, in many respects, remarkable, but in no particular are they so remarkable as in the physical training and education of women....

“The results of this social change have been on the whole beneficial beyond expectation. The health of women generally is improving under the change; there is amongst women generally less bloodlessness, less of what the old fiction-writers called swooning; less of lassitude, less of nervousness, less of hysteria, and much less of that general debility to which, for want of a better term, the words ‘malaise’ and ‘languor’ have been applied. Woman, in a word, is stronger than she was in olden time. With this increase of strength woman has gained in development of body and of limb. She has become less distortioned. The curved back, the pigeon-shaped chest, the disproportioned limb, the narrow feeble trunk, the small and often distorted eyeball, the myopic eye, and puny ill-shaped external ear—all these parts are becoming of better and more natural contour. The muscles are also becoming more equally and more fully developed, and with these improvements, there are growing up amongst women 216models who may, in due time, vie with the best models that old Greek culture has left for us to study in its undying art.”—Dr. Richardson (“The Young Woman,” Oct., 1892).

Id.—“... prophetic scenes,

Spiritual projections ...

In one, the sacred parturition scene,

A happy, painless mother births a perfect child.”

—Walt Whitman (“Autumn Rivulets”).

Id.... “I am so rapt in the beauty of the human form, and so earnestly, so inexpressibly prayerful to see that form perfect, that my full thought is not to be written.... It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities.... When the ambition of the multitude is fixed on the ideal form and beauty, then that ideal will become immediately possible, and a marked advance towards it could be made in three generations.”—Richard Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” pp. 32, 151, 131).

Id....

“‘The Gods?’ In yourselves will ye see them, when Venus shall favour your love,

And man, fitly mated with woman, believes that his love is divine:

When passion shall elevate woman to something so holy and grand

That she—the ideal enraptured—shall ne’er be a check upon Man,

Then the children they bear will be holy, and beauty shall make them her own,

217And man in the eyes of his neighbour will gaze on the reflex divine

Of the God he inclines to in spirit—or trace in each feature and limb

The lines which the body inherits from souls which are noble and true.

Would thou couldst feel in deep earnest, how beautiful God will be then,

When we see Him as Jove or Apollo in men who inspire us with love,

As Juno and Venus the holy, in women who know not the mean,

And feel not the influence cruel of hardness and self-love and scorn.

Would thou couldst once know how real the presence of God will become,

How earnest and ever more earnest thy faith when thyself shall be great,

And from the true worship of others thoult learn what is holy in them,

And rise to the infinite fountain of glory which flows in us all.”

—C. G. Leland (“The Return of the Gods”).

LXI.

3.—“Their science ...”

“Science then

Shall be a precious visitant; and then

And only then, be worthy of her name:

218For then her heart shall kindle; her dull eye,

Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang

Chained to its object in brute slavery;

But taught with patient industry to watch

The processes of things, and serve the cause

Of order and distinctness, not for this

Shall it forget that its most noble use,

Its most illustrious province, must be found

In furnishing clear guidance, a support

Not treacherous, to the mind’s excursive power.”

—Wordsworth (“The Excursion,” Book IV.).

4.—“... crude dimensions ...”

“In these material things, too, I think that we require another circle of ideas, and I believe that such ideas are possible, and, in a manner of speaking, exist. Let me exhort everyone to do their utmost to think outside and beyond our present circle of ideas. For every idea gained is a hundred years of slavery remitted. Even with the idea of organisation, which promises most, I am not satisfied, but endeavour to get beyond and outside it, so that the time now necessary may be shortened.”—Richard Jefferies (“Story of My Heart,” p. 180).

8.—“The love that lifts the life from rank of earth to heaven.”

“... utter knowledge is but utter love—

Æonian Evolution, swift and slow,

Thro’ all the spheres—an ever opening height,

An ever lessening earth.”

—Tennyson (“The Ring”).

219Id....

“The light of love

Not failing, perseverance from their steps

Departing not, they shall at length obtain

The glorious habit by which sense is made

Subservient still to moral purposes,

Auxiliar to divine. That change shall clothe

The naked spirit, ceasing to deplore

The burthen of existence....

——So build we up the Being that we are;

Thus deeply drinking-in the soul of things,

We shall be wise perforce; and, while inspired

By choice, and conscious that the Will is free,

Unswerving shall we move as if impelled

By strict necessity, along the path

Of order and of good. Whate’er we see,

Whate’er we feel, by agency direct

Or indirect, shall tend to feed and nurse

Our faculties, shall fix in calmer seats

Of moral strength, and raise to loftier heights

Of love divine, our intellectual soul.”

—Wordsworth (“The Excursion,” Book IV.).

LXII.

1, 2.—“... winged words on which the soul would pierce

Into the height of love’s rare Universe.”

The two lines are Shelley’s, in his “Epipsychidion.”

7.—“Man’s destiny with woman’s blended be.”

220“... in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man.”

—Tennyson (“The Princess,” Part VII.).

Id.—“Dans ma manière de sentir, je suis femme aux trois quarts.”

—Ernest Renan (“Souvenirs d’Enfance”).

Id....

“Das Ewigweibliche

Zieht uns hinan.”

—Goethe (concluding two lines of “Faust”).

8.—“... progression, ...”

“Unfolded out of the folds of the woman, man comes unfolded, and is always to come unfolded;

Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth, is to come the superbest man of the earth;

Unfolded out of the friendliest woman is to come the friendliest man;

Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman can a man be form’d of perfect body;

Unfolded only out of the inimitable poem of the woman, can come the poems of man ...

Unfolded out of the folds of the woman’s brain come all the folds of the man’s brain, duly obedient;

Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded;

Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy;

221A man is a great thing upon the earth, and through eternity—but every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman,

First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself.”

—Walt Whitman (“Leaves of Grass”).

LXIII.

2.—“... the dream men named Divine,—”

“Divine” was the title of honour conferred on the “Commedia,” by the repentant citizens of Florence, after the death of Dante.

8.—“The love that moves the sun and every circling star.”

The last line of the “Divina Commedia” is—

“Lo amor che move il sole e le altre stelle.”