“You can not deceive me! It might be so, if this were Italy; there, where the very peasant burns with passion, and breathes his feeblest and meanest thoughts and desires in song. But here, they already call me mad! They look on me as one doomed to Bedlam. They avoid me with sentiments and looks of distrust, if not of fear; and when I am looking into the cloud, striving to pierce, with dilating eye its wild yellow flashing centres, they draw their flaxen-headed infants to their breasts, and mutter their thanks to God, that he has not, in a fit of wrath, made them to resemble me! If, forgetful of earth, and trees, and the human stocks around me, I pour forth the language of the great song-masters, they grin at my insanity--they hold me incapable of reason, and declare their ideas of what that is, by asking who knows most of the dairy, the cabbage-patch, the spinning-wheel, the darning-needle--who can best wash Polly's or Patty's face and comb its head--can chop up sausage-meat the finest--make the lightest paste, and more economically dispense the sugar in serving up the tea! and these are what is expected of woman! These duties of the meanest slave! From her mind nothing is expected. Her enthusiasm terrifies, her energy offends, and if her taste is ever challenged, it is to the figures upon a quilt or in a flower-garden, where the passion seems to be to make flowers grow in stars, and hearts, and crescents. What has woman to expect where such are the laws; where such are the expectations from her? What am I to hope? I, who seem to be set apart--to feel nothing like the rest--to live in a different world--to dream of foreign things--to burn with a hope which to them is frenzy, and speak a language which they neither understand nor like! What can I be, in such a world? Nothing, nothing! I do not deceive myself. I can never hope to be anything.” Her enthusiasm hurried her forward. In spite of himself, Stevens was impressed. He ceased to think of his evil purposes in the superior thoughts which her wild, unregulated energy inspired. He scarcely wondered, indeed--if it were true--that her neighbors fancied her insane. The indignation of a powerful mind denied--denied justice--baffled in its aims--conscious of the importance of all its struggles against binding and blinding circumstances--is akin to insanity!--is apt to express itself in the defiant tones of a fierce and feverish frenzy. “Margaret,” said he, as she paused and waited for him, “you are not right in everything. You forget that your lonely little village of Charlemont, is not only not the world, but that it is not even an American world. America is not Italy, I grant you, nor likely soon to become so; but if you fancy there are not cities even in our country, where genius such as yours would be felt and worshipped, you are mistaken.” “Do you believe there are such?” she demanded incredulously. “I KNOW there are!”