Woman's Heavenly Gifts

Alphonse de Lamartine · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages of short sayings by Alphonse de Lamartine, with a substantial biographical footnote occupying much of the second page.

The sayings open with the assertion that there is a woman at the beginning of all great things, and go on to name the two gifts: compassion and enthusiasm, called painful but heavenly, and said to distinguish women and often raise them above human nature — by compassion they devote themselves, by enthusiasm they exalt themselves. The distinction drawn is that enthusiasm springs from the imagination and self-sacrifice from the heart, from which Lamartine concludes that women are more naturally heroic than men, every nation having in its annals some miracle of patriotism of which a woman was the instrument. The genius of women is located in the heart on the ground that the works of that genius are all works of love. Two more general sayings close the selection — that to love for the sake of being loved is human but to love for the sake of loving is angelic, and that man has no harbour and time no shore. The footnote is worth reading in its own right: it records that Lamartine (1790–1869) was instrumental in founding the Second Republic, led the efforts that abolished slavery and the death penalty in France, and was raised by his mother to respect animal life, holding that one does not have one heart for man and one for animals — one has a heart or one does not — and that brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind, the only difference being in the victim.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.4 MB, 2 pages)