Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
A Woman
By Bayard Taylor (18251878)S
In so much as I love her. Could I more,
Then I were more a man. Our natures ran
Together, brimming full, not flooding o’er
The banks of life, and evermore will run
In one full stream until our days are done.
To bear the loss of girlhood’s giddy dreams;
The regal mistress, not the yielding slave
Of her ideal, spurning that which seems
For that which is, and, as her fancies fall,
Smiling: the truth of love outweighs them all.
Weighs men and things, beholding as they are
The lives of others: in the common dust
She finds the fragments of the ruined star:
Proud, with a pride all feminine and sweet,
No path can soil the whiteness of her feet.
Strikes dead deceit, laughs vanity away;
She hath no room for petty jealousies,
Where Faith and Love divide their tender sway.
Of either sex she owns the nobler part;
Man’s honest brow and woman’s faithful heart.
Would climb to power, or in obscure content
Sit down: accepting fate with changeless pride—
A reed in calm, in storm a staff unbent:
No pretty plaything, ignorant of life,
But Man’s true mother, and his equal wife.