Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[19] mind. Yet it has been the custom to speak of her popularity as a thing of the past. Now arrives Mr. Routledge, and gives the figures as to his sales of the different poets in a single calendar year. First comes Longfellow, with the extraordinary sale of 6000 copies; then we drop to Scott, with 3170: Shakespeare, 2700; Byron, 2380; Moore, 2276; Burns, 2250. To these succeeds Mrs. Hemans, with a sale of 1900 copies, Milton falling short of her by 50, and no one else showing much more than half that demand. Hood had 980 purchasers,Cowper, 800, and all others less; Shelley had 500 and Keats but 40. Of course this is hardly even an approximate estimate of the comparative popularity of these poets, since much would depend, for instance, on the multiplicity or value of rival editions; but it proves in a general way that Mrs. Hemans holds her own, in point of readers, fifty years after her death. What other form of influence for man or woman equals this?

Yet there are many other modes of action. That of Florence Nightingale, for instance, modestly vindicating a woman's foresight against the dulness and red tape of a whole War Department, and returning from the most superb career of public service that ever woman had, with ruined health, but with such universal love and reverence from the Crimean army that a statue would have been erected