What tenderest of men
knows how to comfort his own daughter when her heart is broken? What
can the doctrines do for the desolated by death? They were chains of
rusty iron, eating into raw hearts. The prayer of the preacher were
not much better; it sounded like the language of an unknown race to
a despairing girl. Listen to the hymn. It falls like icicles on snow.
Or, if it happen to be one of the old genuine outcries of the Church,
sprung from real human anguish or hope, it maddens the listener, and
she flees from it, too sore a thing to bear the touch of holy music.
At this time, be it said, I had no interest at all in any especial
movement for the peculiar needs of women as a class. I was reared in
circles which did not concern themselves with what we should probably
have called agitators. I was taught the old ideas of womanhood, in the
old way, and had not to any important extent begun to resent them.
Perhaps I am wrong here. Individually, I may have begun to recoil from
them, but only in a purely selfish, personal way, beyond which I had
evolved neither theory nor conscience; much less the smallest tendency
towards sympathy with any public movement of the question.
In the course of two or three years spent in exceptional solitude,
I had read a good deal in the direction of my ruling thoughts and
feeling, and came to the writing of my little book, not ignorant of
what had been written for and by the mourning.
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