Yet, with all this
array of good company, we cannot accord her a miraculous immunity from
the fatalities of her situation. Of the guilt we are not here called
upon to judge; of the suffering many pages in this record of her
life bear witness. Little as we know, however, of her own power of
self-protection against the tyranny of the selfish and the sensual, we
yet feel as if the really base could never have held her in other than
the briefest thraldom, and as if her nobler nature must have continually
asserted and reasserted itself, with a constant tendency towards that
higher liberty which she had sought in the abandonment of outward
restraints, but which can never be thus attained. Some great moral
safeguards she had in her tireless industry, her love of art, her
honesty and geniality of nature, and, above all, in her passionate love
for her children. Happily, these deep and solid forces of Nature are
calculated to outlast the heyday of the blood, and to redeem its errors.
In connection with her domestic life, she gives some explanations which
must not be overlooked. She did not at first quit her husband's roof
with an intention of permanent absence, but with the intention of a
periodical return thither.
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