A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveller betwixt life and death.
With reason firm, with temperate will
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.
A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command.
And yet a spirit still and bright
With something of an angel light.



NAUSICAA IN LONDON; OR, THE LOWER EDUCATION OF WOMEN



Fresh from the Marbles of the British Museum, I went my way
through London streets. My brain was still full of fair and grand
forms; the forms of men and women whose every limb and attitude
betokened perfect health, and grace, and power, and self-
possession and self-restraint so habitual and complete that it had
become unconscious, and undistinguishable from the native freedom
of the savage. For I had been up and down the corridors of those
Greek sculptures, which remain as a perpetual sermon to rich and
poor, amid our artificial, unwholesome, and it may be decaying
pseudo-civilisation, saying with looks more expressive than all
words--Such men and women can be; for such they have been; and
such you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too
often only boast. Above all, I had been pondering over the awful