"Happy, do you say?"
Yes, I say happy.
The nature of woman, it is conceded by all men, is a curious,
interesting, and perplexing, if not, in respect of positive practical
results, a most unsatisfactory study. But nothing puzzles us so much
to comprehend as the fact just alluded to. The tenderest female
constitution will sustain a burden of grief which would crush a robust
and iron-nerved man, and drive him to despair and suicide. A woman
rarely succumbs to a calamity; however sudden and overwhelming the
initial shock may be, she revives and grows cheerful and happy under it
in a way and to a degree marvellous to behold. What singular secret is
there among the psychological mysteries of her nature which is able to
account for this phenomenon?--A gentle, timid girl of sixteen, whom the
sight of a spider or a live snake would have frightened into hysterics,
I had once an opportunity, on a tour through Italy, to observe, while
she took little or no notice of other works of art, would gaze, as if
fascinated, at the writhings of Laocooen and his sons in the folds and
fangs of the serpents, at the sculptured death of the Gladiator, and
even at the ghastly, repulsive pictures of martyrdoms and barbaric
mutilations and tortures,--the hideous monstrosities of a diseased and
degraded imagination found in the churches and convents of Rome, which
made others turn their backs with a shivering of the bones and a
creeping of the flesh.
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