Lines On A Fly-Leaf

I need not ask thee, for my sake,     To read a book which well may make     Its way by native force of wit     Without my manual sign to it.     Its piquant writer needs from me     No gravely masculine guaranty,     And well might laugh her merriest laugh     At broken spears in her behalf;     Yet, spite of all the critics tell,     I frankly own I like her well.     It may be that she wields a pen     Too sharply nibbed for thin-skinned men,     That her keen arrows search and try     The armor joints of dignity,     And, though alone for error meant,     Sing through the air irreverent.     I blame her not, the young athlete     Who plants her woman's tiny feet,     And dares the chances of debate     Where bearded men might hesitate,     Who, deeply earnest, seeing well     The ludicrous and laughable,     Mingling in eloquent excess     Her anger and her tenderness,     And, chiding with a half-caress,     Strives, less for her own sex than ours,     With principalities and powers,     And points us upward to the clear     Sunned heights of her new atmosphere.     Heaven mend her faults! I will not pause     To weigh and doubt and peck at flaws,     Or waste my pity when some fool     Provokes her measureless ridicule.     Strong-minded is she? Better so     Than dulness set for sale or show,     A household folly, capped and belled     In fashion's dance of puppets held,     Or poor pretence of womanhood,     Whose formal, flavorless platitude     Is warranted from all offence     Of robust meaning's violence.     Give me the wine of thought whose head     Sparkles along the page I read,     Electric words in which I find     The tonic of the northwest wind;     The wisdom which itself allies     To sweet and pure humanities,     Where scorn of meanness, hate of wrong,     Are underlaid by love as strong;     The genial play of mirth that lights     Grave themes of thought, as when, on nights     Of summer-time, the harmless blaze     Of thunderless heat-lightning plays,     And tree and hill-top resting dim     And doubtful on the sky's vague rim,     Touched by that soft and lambent gleam,     Start sharply outlined from their dream.     Talk not to me of woman's sphere,     Nor point with Scripture texts a sneer,     Nor wrong the manliest saint of all     By doubt, if he were here, that Paul     Would own the heroines who have lent     Grace to truth's stern arbitrament,     Foregone the praise to woman sweet,     And cast their crowns at Duty's feet;     Like her, who by her strong Appeal     Made Fashion weep and Mammon feel,     Who, earliest summoned to withstand     The color-madness of the land,     Counted her life-long losses gain,     And made her own her sisters' pain;     Or her who, in her greenwood shade,     Heard the sharp call that Freedom made,     And, answering, struck from Sappho's lyre     Of love the Tyrtman carmen's fire     Or that young girl, Domremy's maid     Revived a nobler cause to aid,     Shaking from warning finger-tips     The doom of her apocalypse;     Or her, who world-wide entrance gave     To the log-cabin of the slave,     Made all his want and sorrow known,     And all earth's languages his own