Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
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Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
My dear mother once described to me a resplendent person, down on Long
Island, whom she knew in early days. She was known by the name of the
Peacemaker. She was well toward eighty years old, of happy and sunny
temperament, had always lived on a farm, and was very neighborly,
sensible and discreet, an invariable and welcom'd favorite, especially
with young married women. She had numerous children and grandchildren.
She was uneducated, but possess'd a native dignity. She had come to be a
tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of difficulties,
shepherdess, and reconciler in the land. She was a sight to draw near
and look upon, with her large figure, her profuse snow-white hair,
(uncoil'd by any head-dress or cap,) dark eyes, clear complexion, sweet
breath, and peculiar personal magnetism.
The foregoing portraits, I admit, are frightfully out of line from these
imported models of womanly personality--the stock feminine characters of
the current novelists, or of the foreign court poems, (Ophelias, Enids,
princesses, or ladies of one thing or another,) which fill the envying
dreams of so many poor girls, and are accepted by our men, too, as
supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought after. But I present
mine just for a change.
Then there are mutterings, (we will not now stop to heed them here, but
they must be heeded,) of something more revolutionary. The day is coming
when the deep questions of woman's entrance amid the arenas of practical
life, politics, the suffrage, &c., will not only be argued all around
us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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