Woman’s rights, too, thus early took root, sprouting out like young shoots from the old rotting stumps of a decaying civilization. Anne Hutchinson,—not Dickinson,—grieved in soul by the exclusion of her sex from the right to discuss and criticise, at the weekly meeting of the congregation, the last Sunday’s discourse,—a right now practised all over the world,—created by her fiery eloquence such a blaze in Massachusetts, that she soon made the Colony too hot for her. Sir Harry Vane, strange to say, did not turn the way that the wind blew; but, although a governor and a baronet, veered against the current of hot air. Let reformers pluck from these pages a fragrant leaf pressed and preserved for their reading when faint. It was from this little seed capsule, enwrapping a precious life, warmed by the heat of a woman’s mind, there sprang up in a few years that beautiful flower of spiritual liberty that now sends its rippling odor from sea to sea. [Illustration: WOMAN’S RIGHTS IN 1637. (p. 158) ] Thus in all high places of political power there was a general thaw of royal prerogative and proprietarial claim; and popular rights trickled down upon the plain below. Galileo, in 1633, was condemned for asserting that the earth was a confirmed revolutionist; yet even fifty years after there might have been wafted back over his tomb on the Arno, from the shores of the James, the Susquehanna, and even from the Merrimack, a wind-gram, iterating his own protesting words, “_E pur il se muove._” Yes, the world did move! Even that hard part of it, crusted over with stern though earnest religious dogmas, began to stir. The austerity of Puritan faith, conscientious yet severe, which had worn the russet grimness which its own persecution in England had gathered around it—as hard woods, lying in damp, imprisoning places, become clothed with fungus growths—began to feel some of the sunny effects of the Hutchinson illumination. In Virginia time and free discussion were wearing away the granite barriers within which its legislation and loyalty had always sought to hem into a single channel, the Episcopal, the diverging streams of religious convictions.