The great mystery of God’s providence is the permitted crushing out of flowering instincts.  Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiments.  In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed.  Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe.  Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments.  The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison.  Watch her through its transparent walls;—­her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum.  Death is no riddle, compared to this.  I remember a poor girl’s story in the “Book of Martyrs.”  The “dry-pan and the gradual fire” were the images that frightened her most.  How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!

Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain, overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young person, whoever you may be, now reading this,—­little thinking you are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such multitudes worthier than yourself.  But it is only my surface-thought which laughs.  For that great procession of the unloved, who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the locks of brown or gray,—­under the snowy cap, under the chilling turban,—­hide it even from themselves,—­perhaps never know they wear it, though it kills them,—­there is no depth of tenderness in my nature that Pity has not sounded.  Somewhere,—­somewhere,—­love is in store for them,—­the universe must not be allowed to fool them so cruelly.  What infinite pathos in the small, half-unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God-given instincts!

Read what the singing-women—­one to ten thousand of the suffering women—­tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken!  Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue slate-stones at their head and feet, for whom it was just as true that “all sounds of life assumed one tone of love,” as for Letitia Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she could give words to her grief, and they could not.—­Will you hear a few stanzas of mine?

THE VOICELESS.

We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,—­
But o’er their silent sister’s breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number? 
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;—­
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!