To fix these thoughts--to keep them from wandering! This was a difficulty. Margaret Cooper strove to do so, but she could not. Never did her mind seem such a perfect chaos--so full of confused and confusing objects and images. Her whole life seemed to pass in review before her. All her dreams of ambition, all the struggles of her genius! Were these to be thrown away? Were these all to be wasted? Was her song to be unheard? Was her passionate and proud soul to have no voice? If death is terrible to man, it is terrible, not as a pang, but as an oblivion; and to the soul of genius, oblivion is a soul-death, and its thought is a source of tenfold terror. “But of what avail were life to me now? Even should I live,” said the wretched woman, “would it matter more to the ambition which I have had, and to the soul which flames and fevers within me? Who would hearken to the song of the degraded? Who, that heard the story of my shame, would listen to the strains of my genius? Say that its utterance is even as proud as my own vanity of heart would esteem it--say that no plaint like mine had ever touched the ear or lifted the heart of humanity! Alas! of what avail! The finger of scorn would be uplifted long before the voice of applause. The sneer and sarcasm of the worldling would anticipate the favoring judgment of the indulgent and the wise. Who would do justice to my cause? Who listen? Alas! the voice of genius would be of little avail speaking from the lips of the dishonored. “To the talent which I have, and the ambition which still burns within me, life then can bring nothing--no exercise--no fruition. Suppose, then, that the talent is left to slumber--the ambition stifled till it has no further longings! Will life yield anything to the mere creature of society--to my youth--to my beauty--to my sense of delight--if still there be any such sense left to me? Shall I be less the creature of social scorn, because I have yielded my ambition--because I have forborne the employment of those glorious gifts which Heaven in its bounty has allotted me? “Alas! no! am I not a woman, one of that frail, feeble sex, whose name is weakness?--of whom, having no strength, man yet expects the proofs of the most unyielding--of a firmness which he himself can not exercise--of a power of self-denial and endurance of which he exhibits no example. If I weep, he smiles at my weakness. If I stifle my tears, he denounces my unnatural hardihood. If I am cold and unyielding, I am masculine and neglected--if I am gentle and pliant, my confidence is abused and my person dishonored. What can society, which is thus exacting, accord to me, then, as a mere woman? What shame will it not thrust upon me--a woman--and as I am?