Her teeth were shown through the loving lips she parted in her stormy
dreams, like waves tossing the alabaster sails of the nautilus, or like
some ear of Indian corn exposed in the gale that blows across the
tasselled field.
Her raiment, partly torn from her, showed her supple figure and neck,
and, beneath her mass of silky hair, her white arm, like an ivory
serpent, sustained her head, her handsome feet being fine and high-bred,
like the soul that bounded in her maiden ambition.
There had been days when such as she called Antony away from his wife,
and Caesar from his classical selfishness; when on many an Eastern throne
such beauty as this stirred to murmurous glory armies beyond compute,
and clashed the cymbals of prodigious conquests. She lay upon the
altar-cushions of the church, like young Isaac upon his father's altar,
and where the mourners knelt to pray for God's reconcilement, the
cruelty of their law flashed over her like Abraham's superstitious
knife.
Priceless was this young creature, in noble hands, as wife or daughter,
human food or fair divinity, and all the precious mysteries of woman
awake in her to love and conjugality, like song and seed in the spring
bird; yet a hard, steely prejudice had shut her out from every
institution and equality, let every crime be perpetrated upon her, made
the scent of freedom in her nostrils worse than the incentive of the
thief, and has outlasted her half a century, and is self-righteous and
inflexible yet.
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