Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[18] a competent female assistant in the high-school-“what we want, gentlemen, is a splendid woman.” This was at once accepted by all as a complete formula for the situation; it was the later task of actually hunting up this priceless creature, and securing her for eight hundred dollars a year, that proved formidable.

In these days one is certainly impressed with the prominence of literature as a sphere for the Woman of Influence. When we think of the thousands of high-schools and academies throughout the land in which, next graduation-day, some maiden in white will read an essay on “The genius of George Eliot,” we may well say with Rufus Choate, “After all, a book is the only immortality.” And surely the reader is impressed with the way in which a woman's genius, even if not of the very highest order, may retain its hold after her death, on seeing the late statements of Mr. Routledge, the great publisher of cheap books in England, as to the continued demand for Mrs. Hemans's poetry. In the last generation the pure and melodious muse of this lady had great reputation; her American editor was Professor Andrews Norton, father of the present Professor Charles Eliot Norton, and one of the most cultivated critics of his day; and it appears from the late memoirs of Garrison that her verses were long the favorite food of that strong and heroic