Article #41 - Womans Genius

        Selected for the Journal

            Womans Genius

If a womans heart have yearnings,

Which time alone can fill

If the holiest aspirations

Her restless bosom fill

If from the fountain of her breast

Flows every lofty thought

And with all glorious imagery

Her heart & mind be fraught,

Must she because a woman

Cast all those gifts aside

Those treasures of the mind & heart

Which ought to be her pride

Must she smother every feeling

That burns to be expressed

And turn aside that fount of thought

Which gushes from the breast.

Must she keep her thoughts unuttered,

Must her genius be confined?

Must she draw a thick & darking veil

O’er the beauties of the mind?

Because by common minds ‘tis thought

That woman quits her sphere,

When she in point of intellect,

Steps forth as mans compeer.

Why did her maker thus endow

A womans soul with power

If she must all those gifts conceal

Were it not a useless dower?

Because a woman has the power

To climb Parnassus’ hill

And at the stream of Helicon, Her thirsty soul to fill –

It does not render her unfit, for the social ties of life,

Nor prevent her from fulfilling, her duty as a wife

Oh! then let woman strive her best, To improve the talents given

But, with deep humility of heart, With gratitude to Heaven.

Education says a pretty & truthful virtue, does not commence with the alphabet. It begins with a mother’s look – with a sisters gentle pressure of the hand, or a brother’s noble act of forebearance, with handfulls [sic] of flowers in green & daisy meadows, with birds nests, admired

but not touched, with creeping ants, & almost imperceptible  ??moments, with humming bees, & glass bee hives, with pleasant walks in shady lanes, & with thoughts directed in sweet & kindly tomes, & words, to nature, to beauty to acts of benevolence, to deeds of virtue, & to the ?? of all good, to God himself.