University of Virginia Library

MISS AYMAR, OF NEW YORK.

By the vote of Underdone-dom, (the stripling constituency of
belle-ship in New York,) Miss Aymar would, perhaps, scarce be
elected a belle; yet a stranger, accustomed to the society of
women of high rank, abroad, would recognize in her, at a first
glance, a quality of beauty and manners which would have been
the pride and admiration of a court. Dignified without being repulsive—cold
without being reserved—full and perfect in figure and
health, yet of marble paleness—frank, yet smiling seldom—a head
set very proudly upon the shoulders, yet pliant and natural in all
its movements—she is the type of what is meant, abroad, when
they say of a woman that she “looks like a duchess.” Add to
this an oval cast of features, a well-completed outline to the
cheek, a round yet tapering chin, and a throat curved gracefully
from the head, and there seems nothing wanting, to Miss Aymar,
of those peculiarities which, in England, are thought most desirable
to grace a title.

In proportion to the nobleness and fine balance of qualities in a
woman, (and this we have admired and wondered at, more than

any other peculiarity of the sex), is the unsuspecting readiness of
her assent to destiny. With all the superiority of Miss Aymar,
and the manifest want of a proper response to the call of her mind
and heart, she plays her part with unaffected earnestness and contentment,
receives what attention falls to her lot with as much
pleasure as if any higher intercourse and homage would be beyond
her capacity to appreciate, and, (if we may be pardoned the
similitude,) simply does her best, like a blood courser at the
plough, without intimating, by discontent or resistance, that her
fine nature is out of place and unappreciated. The merest
dancing partner, who bespeaks an invitation to her mother's
house by asking her hand for a quadrille, believes any favor there
may be in the matter, to be entirely of his own granting—setting
down the unvoiced superiority, by which he is mysteriously kept
at a distance, as a “something or other about her manner which
is not very agreeable.”

Of course there is a “world of one's own,” without which unappreciated
poets would come down to what is thought of them,
and superior women, by mere lack of recognition, grow like the
common-place people among whom they are numbered. Miss
Aymar's door shuts in a tranquil universe of thought, of choice
books, and of culture which is a luxury without effort; and here
the mind, which is bent to the world, daily recovers its stature,
and the sympathies, whose noble harmony is diminished to accord
with lesser natures, resume their capability and tone. It is by
natural and unconscious echo to the chance-sounded key-note of
a kindred mind, that the true melody of this inner life is alone
betrayed, for it is never ostentatiously sounded to those whom it
might disparage or rebuke. Miss Aymar has her appreciators;
but, unfortunately, from the very advance of her progress, they

are necessarily only those whom she has overtaken—who are not
of her own age—who have learned, by disappointment, comparison,
and life's varied experiences of bitter and sweet, the true
value of what she scarce recognises in herself. In foreign society,
where the men, up to a marriageable age, are kept away from
narrowing cares and devoted wholly to such general cultivation as
fits them to adorn fortune when they receive it, and fitly to mate
the delicacy and dignity of a superior woman when they wed her,
she would only have the embarrassment of choice, among competitors
for her hand, all suitable in age and accomplishments.
Here, such youths are rare; and, as Miss Aymar is not a woman
to marry except with the fullest consent of her own taste and
feeling, she is (we admiringly fear!) in some danger of never
being the wife she could be—the perfect wife made up of contradictions
and contrasts—such a one as Shakspeare's Helena promises
to be to Bertram:—