"If I, he may thus argue, who exercise my own mind, and have been refined by tribulation, find the serpent's egg in some fold of my heart, and crush it with difficulty, shall I not pity those who have stamped with less vigour, or who have heedlessly nurtured the insidious reptile till it poisoned the vital stream it sucked?"
— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Work Title
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Printed for J. Johnson
Date
1792
Metaphor
"If I, he may thus argue, who exercise my own mind, and have been refined by tribulation, find the serpent's egg in some fold of my heart, and crush it with difficulty, shall I not pity those who have stamped with less vigour, or who have heedlessly nurtured the insidious reptile till it poisoned the vital stream it sucked?"
Metaphor in Context
If I, he may thus argue, who exercise my own mind, and have been refined by tribulation, find the serpent's egg in some fold of my heart, and crush it with difficulty, shall I not pity those who have stamped with less vigour, or who have heedlessly nurtured the insidious reptile till it poisoned the vital stream it sucked? Can I, conscious of my secret sins, throw off my fellow creatures, and calmly see them drop into the chasm of perdition, that yawns to receive them. No, no! The agonised heart will cry with suffocating impatience--I, too, am a man! and have vices hid perhaps, from human eye, that bend me to the dust before God, and loudly tell me, when all is mute, that we are formed of the same earth, and breathe the same element. Humanity thus rises naturally out of humility, and twists the cords of love that in various convolutions entangle the heart.
(p. 136)
(p. 136)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
7 entries in ESTC (1792, 1793, 1794, 1796).
See A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. by Mary Wollstonecraft. (London: Printed for J. Johnson, No 72, St. Paul's Church Yard, 1792). <Link to ECCO-TCP>
Reading Wollstonecraft, M. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Modern Library (New York: Random House, 2001). Also The Vindications, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001).
See also Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: J. Johnson, 1792). <Link to OLL>
See A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. by Mary Wollstonecraft. (London: Printed for J. Johnson, No 72, St. Paul's Church Yard, 1792). <Link to ECCO-TCP>
Reading Wollstonecraft, M. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Modern Library (New York: Random House, 2001). Also The Vindications, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001).
See also Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: J. Johnson, 1792). <Link to OLL>
Date of Entry
09/14/2009
