I 2 8 INTROD UC TION
me, greedily devouring, not only the collection, but infor- mation of other kinds, with which he loads his note-books. He will, I think, educate himself to some advantage. Thus, you see, I continue to spin out enjoyment with persons younger than myself — the boys who, susceptible both of head and heart, form an agreeable counterpart to the fossil and fogyish state into which so many persons have fallen whom, as a boy or young man, I looked up to with respect. Yet who knows ? Perhaps some of these younger ones are destined in a few years to fall into the same Struldbruggish condition.
I am sorry to learn that the Swedenborgians have dis- missed from his little church my good old master, T. B. Hayward, a kind and a learned man, and a most excellent teacher. It could not be, I think, because he saw more ghosts than his congregation, though he had written a pamphlet lately, as I learn, concerning the war, in which he expressed the opinion that the Sprites would ere long put an end to it. I wish they may !
We have at last the Female Moral Reform — woman's rights — down with the men, up with the petticoat — cleri- colegomedicophilosophical associations in full blast once more, petitioning the legislature for the rights of voting and of superiority to men, etc. etc., refusing to be longer taxed without being represented, and all under the name of woman's rights, as if we had any of us any rights except those of duty, or as if all so-called rights in civil society were aught but policies. How strange that they should not see that the re-enslavement of women com- mences at the point of their competition with men, and that their real influence is only derived from beauty, grace, affection, gentleness, and sympathy, which when they wholly lose, they become monsters and are so regarded of
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