But, as we intimated, the book, like fame, increases in going.  Under all the wit and humor, which are often very charming, under all the satire, which is none the less enjoyable because occasionally half-hidden, under the somewhat multifarious machinery, which the peculiar structure of the book renders necessary, there rises slowly into view and presently into prominence the outline of a purpose as noble as it is rare.  In the teeth of popular prejudice, Bayard Taylor has had the courage to take for his heroine a woman “strong-minded,” austere in her faith, past her first youth, given to public speaking, and imbued, we might almost say to stubbornness, with ultra ideas of “woman’s rights.”  True, he has given her to us in the most modified form possible to such a character, utterly pure, unselfish, true, refined, without ambition, impelled by the highest motives, and guided by the highest principles.  But the conjunction of these two classes of qualities in one person is the real Malakoff.  That accomplished and the work is done.  In this conception lies the true originality of the book.  In this attempt lies the true consciousness of power.  He who can make his hero say,—­“It was my profound appreciation of those very elements in your character which led you to take up these claims of woman and make them your own, that opened the way for you to my heart:  I reverence the qualities, without accepting all the conclusions born of them,”—­has a deeper insight than most of his fellows.  He shows that he looks at things, and not at the traditions of things.  He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of tawdry tinsel.

Yet even here he has not struck all truth.  It is the most improbable thing in the world that any woman should have built up such a wall around herself as is represented here.  It is morally impossible that such a woman as Hannah Thurston should have done it.  It is simply unnatural.  It might, perhaps, happen, just as a woman might happen to have been born with five fingers on each hand.  But it is not with freaks of Nature, it is with Nature, that we have to deal.  Girls may please themselves with fine-sounding phrases about equal powers and equal rights in marriage, but they generally vanish with the first approach of a living affection.  No idea of independence or equality ever, we dare affirm, came between a great nature and its great love.  No woman of exalted aims and large capacities, it may be safely said, will ever be held back from love, or even from marriage, by any scruples as to her relative standing.  The stumbling-block in the way of such a woman as Hannah Thurston would not be a dread of the “submission of love,” but rather of a submission without love, a submission of mere contiguity to somewhat hard, false, coarse, unjust, naming itself with a name to which it had no title.  If she