Motherhood is, after all, woman's great and incomparable work.

With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome.

What is the good of life if its chief element, and that which must always be its chief element, is odious? No, the only true economy is to arrange so that your daily labor shall be itself a joy.

Anyone who realises what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others.

And where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds came to listen with serious and sympathetic mien.

The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau's Walden.

I saw deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.