A Plea For Woman Poem by John Critchley Prince

It is well that beauteous woman
Has the quickest sense of wrong;
That the tenderest traits of feeling
To her faithful heart belong;
That her pure, heroic spirit,
Made to soften and prevail,
Wins its way to truth and justice,
When our ruder efforts fail.

Has she not from earliest ages
Borne the heaviest load of life,
Suffered in the silent conflict,
Struggled in the rudest strife?
Has she not with patient meekness
Won and worn the martyr's crown?
Even by her seeming weakness
Pulled the strongest tyrant down?

Day by day she has encountered
In her own domestic round,
Sharpest griefs, severest tortures,
All for language too profound;
Trembled through her woman's nature
Lest the outward world should know,
Single in her calm endurance,
Loving in her lofty woe.

Pestilence has not appalled her,
Dungeons have not driven her back,
She has smiled upon the scaffold,
And been silent on the rack.
She, a ministress of mercy,
Has gone forth from door to door,
'Suaging sickness, soothing sorrow,
In the chambers of the poor.

All unselfish, she has pleaded,
With an angel's earnest grace,
'Gainst the brand-mark and the bondage
Of old Afric's dusky race;
And not only for the alien,—
If an alien there can be—
But for all who shrink and suffer
On her own side of the sea:

Pleaded for her sister woman,
Moiling through the joyless day,
Hungering, hopeless, ever trembling
Lest she swerve from virtue's way;
Pleaded for the little children
Growing up to dangerous youth,
For the want of wholesome knowledge,
For the lack of genial truth.

And she has not been ungifted
With the mind's superior powers,
But has brought us bloom and fragrance
From the muse's magic bowers;
She has stirred our inmost natures
With a true and graceful pen,
Even snatched a wreath of honour
From the bolder brows of men.

Then let this dear mediator,
This companion of our way,
Have her natural power and province
In the great work of to-day;
Let her go upon her mission,
If she have no wish to roam,
Nor to break the ties that bind her
To the sacred bounds of home.

Let her have the purest knowledge,
That hereafter she may be
Teacher of serenest virtues,
To the children round her knee;
Foresight, faithfulness, forbearance,
Charity, and all good things,
Which prepare the human creature
For its future angel wings