The Clergyman's Wife and Other Sketches/Wifely Help

by Anna Cora Mowatt

WIFELY HELP.

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hen Columbus braved the perils of unknown seas to add America to the world, it was the white hand of a woman that fitted him for his venturesome voyage of discovery. So woman equips man every day for the voyage of life. Woman as man's helper rises to her "peculiar and best altitude." He represents the intellect, she the mind-governing heart. Power appertains to him, but influence, more subtle and penetrating than power—another name for power in its most delicate and all-pervading form—belongs to her.

Sheridan said "it is by woman that nature writes upon the heart of man," and what hand can trace such glorious inscriptions upon that book, when it is sacredly hers, as a wife's? Was there ever man, however great his moral strength, however exalted his intellectual height, whose powers could not be increased by a wife's aid, or enfeebled by the down-dragging weight of her unsympathetic opposition? The man to whom she is united (when that union is not a mere, formal mockery,) draws inspiration from the magnetic breath of her appreciative praises. If he is fortunate, her enthusiasm gives sweetness to his successes;—if he is struggling, her heroism in battling with difficulties, infuses courage into his soul;—if his steps are dogged by the evil spirit of failure, her cheerful patience softens the disheartening persecutions of the demon. When he returns troubled and fretful to his home, her tact ignores his ill humor until he forgets it himself;—when he is unreasonable she smiles, unseen, at his grave contradictions, and allows him to chide her for supposed caprice. She bears with his failings as no one else can or will bear with them;—she well knows that endurance is her own especial gift, and not his, and deems his peevishness and impatience, when he is suffering, a matter of course, though double the amount of pain would not extract from her a murmur or a groan. She comprehends how much the peace and happiness of life—married life in particular—depend upon trifles as light as air, and strives to guard him against petty domestic vexations, less endurable to some temperaments than actual afflictions. She never forgets that the absence from its proper place of the tiny but all important button, the mislaying of the indispensable closet keys, the necessity of waiting for an unpunctual meal, may imperil a man's affection, or unfit him for his most important avocations, particularly if they are of an intellectual or artistic character.

Let the wife only understand and have faith in her true position, that of woman "the helper," and she needs neither great gifts, nor an expansive mind, nor extraordinary beauty to be always charming to her husband, and, while she walks by his side, to

"Fill all the stops of life with music."

In being literally his "help-meet" she becomes the beautifier and healer of his life. If the parasitic vine about the oak-tree, to which she is so often compared, be truly her emblem, it is because she binds together the broken boughs, and drapes with verdurous loveliness the withered branches.