Whitmans Ideal Democracy And Other Writings

. RALPH W ALDO EM ERSON Q a b l e o f Contents H ELENA BORNS childhood was happy and uneventful. She was born in a Devonshire village May I I, I 860. An only child, she attended the day-school at Hatherleigh, receiving later the groundwork of a sound education in an academy at Taunton. She excelled in her studies, evinced a taste for mathematics, and looked longingly toward a college training. Though this ambition was never realized, the wide world became her university, wherein she was ever graduating from endeavor to achievement. When her family moved to Bristol she advanced step by step into the broader currents of thought, but found herself struggling for expression against a well-nigh insuperable diffidence that was never entirely overcome, though in later years it became one of her sweetest and most lovable qualities. In Bristol Helena naturally entered the coterie of men and women who in the metropolis of the west of England eagerly followed the intellectual and public interests of the day. She became an active worker in the Bristol Womens Liberal Association, seeking freedom and equality for women through suffrage, civic reform, and political education, and for several years was a member of the Executive Committee of the Association. A letter from an early friend affords a glimpse of Helena Born at this period. She writes When we first met, Helena had just recently lost her mother, who had been like a sister to her. They had been perfect companions, and she felt her mothers death terribly. Being now her fathers housekeeper, domestic duties took up a large part of her time. She often came home with me from rehearsals, and sometimes engaged in earnest conversation with my father on social and political topics. At that time she certainly had ideas of her own, expressing them in a rapid, nervous xii manner. After a vigorous argument with father she would become silent, though not convinced by him, and would then end up with a laugh. t6Helena loved music, played the piano, and sang in the choir of the Oakfield Road Unitarian Church in Bristol, of which Mr. Hargreeves was pastor. She liked his preaching, which was of the broadest, but admired even more that of Stopford Brooke, who occupied the pulpit there for a short time. r r We attended a debating society attached to the church, and she would often force herself to rise and speak, if only a few words. Such was her extreme diffidence that I alone knew what the effort cost her. I remember how she enjoyed a whole day we spent together in the country. We walked miles and miles, and ate our lunch sitting up on a haymow. We sometimes went to dances together, and. once went up to London to visit the Exhibition. She had many interests outside her home, devoting what time she could to them. Her people disapproved of her course in taking up public questions, which was a great trial to her, but did not affect her convictions or what she believed to be her duty. Her intellectual interests, as represented by her reading, embraced a wide field...