utterance of a good woman's feelings. They are speaking
of men and of women's affections. 'You are always labouring and
toiling,' she says, 'exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home,
country, friends, all united; neither time nor life to be called your
own. It would be too hard, indeed (with a faltering voice), if a woman's
feelings were to be added to all this.'

Further on she says, eagerly: 'I hope I do justice to all that is
felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should
undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures.
I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment
and constancy were known only by woman. No! I believe you capable of
everything good and great in your married lives. I believe you equal
to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance so long
as--if I may be allowed the expression--so long as you have an object;
I mean while the woman you love lives and lives for you. _All the
privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you
need not court it) is that of loving longest when existence or when hope
is gone._'

She could not immediately have uttered another sentence--her heart was
too full, her breath too much oppressed.

Dear Anne Elliot!--sweet, impulsive, womanly, tender-hearted--one can
almost hear her voice, pleading the cause of all true women. In those
days when, perhaps, people's nerves were stronger than they are now,
sentiment may have existed in a less degree, or have been more ruled by
judgment, it may have been calmer and more matter-of-fact; and yet Jane
Austen, at the very end of her life, wrote thus. Her words seem to ring
in our ears after they have been spoken. Anne Elliot must have been Jane
Austen herself, speaking for the last time. There is something so true,
so womanly about her, that it is impossible not to love her most of all.
She is the bright-eyed heroine of the earlier novels, matured, softened,
cultivated, to whom fidelity has brought only greater depth and
sweetness instead of bitterness and pain.

What a difficult thing it would be to sit down and try to enumerate the
different influences by which our lives have been affected--influences
of other lives, of art, of nature, of place and circumstance,--of
beautiful sights passing before our eyes, or painful ones: seasons
following in their course--hills rising on our horizons--scenes of ruin
and desolation--crow