THE TABLE TALKER. THE FEMININE HEART. FEW things are more touching to a contem plative and affectionate mind than the meek, patient, enduring, beautiful constancy which the heart of woman so often exhibits. Lord Byron, who, with all his declamation about beauty and passion, did a great deal more by his writings to degrade, than to exalt, the female character, has one passage in particular which has been much admired (and by women too), but which (according to my view of the matter) winds up with one of the most offensive opinions regarding womankind that I have met with in any modern book. The poet makes Donna Julia enter into a sort of comparison of the common fate of men and women, and she expresses herself thus "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, "Tis woman's whole existence: man may range The court, camp, church; the vessel and the mart, Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange, Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart, What sense can we make of such a passage, but this?—that whereas a man, having satiated his love-fit, may occupy his heart with various other things he may turn to war or politicsto law, physic, or divinity-or even to merchandise; a woman has nothing for it but to try another lover, and be transported again and again by passion into sin. If this be a fair interpretation of the lines, and I really do not see what other can be put upon them, are they not most insulting to the female character? It is true they are given as part of a letter from a lady, who had previously proved that she was not less impudent than licentious, but it is evident that the letter is intended to be an exquisite description of genuine feminine feelings. It is of this very letter that Mr. Jeffrey speaks, when he says that "the poet chooses to make this shameless and abandoned woman address to her young gallant an epistle breathing the very spirit of warm, devoted, pure, and unalterable love—thus profaning the holiest language of the heart, and indirectly associating it with the most hateful and degrading sensualism. Thus are our notions of right and wrong at once confounded-our confidence in virtue shaken to the foundation-and our reliance on truth and fidelity at an end for ever." I cannot tell what induced Mr. Jeffrey to say that a letter, in which the lady-writer of it speaks of loving again, and being again undone, breathes the spirit of "pure" and "unalterable" love, but it seems most likely that the poet intended the letter to be a very captivating and womanly production. Indeed he makes the Lady Julia say towards the close of her epistle, 66 My heart is feminine, nor can forget, As a general rule I should recommend ladies to allow the fact of their hearts being feminine to be inferred by others rather than asserted by themselves; but there is this excuse for Donna Julia, that if she had not given direct testimony in her heart's behalf, no one would, in all probability, have made the discovery of its feminine character. How much more beautiful than the lines just quoted (and also in my opinion, how much more true) are the following. I know not by whom they were written. They appeared a long long time ago—not far short of twenty years ago, I rather think, in a London magazine, with the signature "M.": "Whither-ah, whither, is my lost love straying; Upon what pleasant land beyond the sea? Oh ye winds, now playing, |