Widows

Winter kept apples, seasoned wine, a clouded meerschaum, a vase around which the scent of the roses still hangs, all these have a rare, ripe, evanescent flavor that suggests but cannot express the charm of widowhood. A young widow is, perhaps, the most interesting object of nature or in art. She represents experience without its wrinkles or its gray hair. She is matronly beauty and maidenly freedom combined. She is grief with a laughing eye—sorrow in a house of festival—a silver moon in a sable cloud.

She is too sweet for anything! Like all good things, she can only be created at a great sacrifice.

Mrs. Browning says that you must spoil a man to make a poet; and certainly a man must be pretty thoroughly spoiled before he can leave a widow. This black swan—this mournful Phoenix—rises only out of funeral urn that holds the ashes of a husband's heart! Let us wipe away the briny tear and proceed. Pergite Pierides.

Poets, statesmen, heroes and philosophers have each felt the undeniable influence of widowhood. Its quality is not strained. It falls alike upon the just and the unjust. None can escape. Edward PLantagenet wedded the widow Elizabeth Gray, though he knew she brought civilwar for her dowry. Ned Waller, Joe Addison, Sam Johnson, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Wesley, Tony Weller, Ben Disreali, and all the boys married widows. Henry the Eighth was so fond of them that he took two: and king David was so pleased with Abigail, the widow of Nabal, whom he took to wife, that he turned Bathsheba into a widow on purpose to marry her.

When Judith ceases her cogitations over the virtues of the late lamented Manasses of Bethulia, puts off her mourning and adorns herself in brave attire to set out for the camp of Holofernes, we feel instinctively that she will come back with his heart, his crown or his head whichsoever she goes for. When the old widow Naomi counsels the young widow Ruth how to lay her snares in the harvest fields of her kinsman and spring her net on the threshing floors, we know at once that the wealthy bachelor Boaz might as well order the wedding garments. Allan Ramsey wrote a song telling how to woo a widow; he might as well have left directions how to get struck with lightning.

This piece was first published in New York World, but republished in The Cycle (1876)