The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty YearsHarper, Ida Husted
History
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years
Harper, Ida Husted
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
You are watchful but not timid, careful to have everything right
and safe before you embark; but when times of difficulty and danger
arrive, you meet them with coolness and intrepidity. You have more
of the spirit of acquisition than of economy; you would rather make
new things than patch the old. Your continuity is not large enough.
You find it at times difficult to bring the whole strength of your
mind to bear upon a subject and hold it there patiently in writing
or speaking. You are apt to seize upon fugitive thoughts and
wander, unless it be a subject on which you have so drilled your
intellect as to become master of it.
You have a full development of the social group. I judge that in
the main you have your father's character and talents and your
mother's temperament. You have the spirit of her nature, but the
framework in the main is like the father. You have large
benevolence, not only in the direction of sympathy but of
gratitude. You have frankness of character, even to sharpness, and
you are obliged to bridle your tongue lest you speak more than is
meet. You have mechanical ingenuity, the planning talent, and the
minds of others are apt to be used as instruments to accomplish
your objects. For instance, if you were a lawyer, you would arrange
the testimony and the mode of argument in such a way that the best
final result would be achieved. You judge correctly of the fitness
and propriety, as well as of the power, of the means you have to be
employed. You would plan a thing better than you could use the
tools to make it. Your reasoning organs are gaining upon your
perceptions. At fifteen your mind was devoted to facts and
phenomena; of late years you have been thinking of principles and
ideas. You are a keen critic, especially if you can put wit as a
cracker on your whip; you can make people feel little and mean if
they are so, and when you are vexed can say very sharp things.
You are a good judge of character. You have a full development of
language devoted rather to accuracy and definiteness of meaning
than volubility; and yet I doubt not you talk fast when
excited--that belongs to your temperament. Your intellect is active
and your mind more naturally runs in the channel of intellect than
of feeling. It seeks an intellectual development rather than to be
developed through the affections merely. You have fair veneration
and spirituality but are nothing remarkable in these respects. Your
chief religious elements are conscience and benevolence; these are
your working religious organs, and a religion that does not gratify
them is to you "as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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