Elizabeth Oakes Smith
Elizabeth Oakes Smith
Elizabeth Oakes Smith was an American poet, fiction writer, editor, lecturer, and women's rights activist whose career spanned six decades, from the 1830s to the 1880s. Most well-known at the start of her professional career for poems such as "A Corpse Going to a Ball", which appeared in The Neapolitan in 1841, and "The Sinless Child", which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1842, her
"Tis rushing now adown the spout And gushing out below, Half frantic in its joyousness, And wild in eager flow. The earth is dried and parch’d with heat, And it hath longed to be Released from out the selfish cloud, To cool the thirsty tree."
"My friends, do we realize for what purpose we are convened? Do we fully understand that we aim at nothing less than an entire subversion of the present order of society, a dissolution of the whole existing compact? Do we see that it is not an error of today, nor of yesterday against which we are lifting up the voice of dissent but that it is against the ... error of all times — error borne onward from the footprints of the first pair ejected from Paradise, down to our own time? ... Bitterness is the child of wrong; if any of our number has become embittered ... it is because social wrong has so penetrated to the inner life that we are crucified today."
"How few women have any history after the age of thirty!"
"Faith is the subtle chain, Which binds us to the Infinite: the voice Of a deep life within, that will remain Until we crowd it thence."
"Tis the summer prime, when the noiseless air In perfumed chalice lies, And the bee goes by with a lazy hum Beneath the sleeping skies."
"Yes, this is Life; and everywhere we meet, Not victor crowns, but wailings of defeat."
