Quotes from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life.

Intense love is often akin to intense suffering.

It was a strange sight to see these black men rallying around the Stars and Stripes, when white men were trampling them under foot and riddling them with bullets.

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.

Make me a grave where'er you will, In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill; Make it among earth's humblest graves, But not in a land where men are slaves. […] I ask no monument, proud and high, To arrest the gaze of the passers-by; All that my yearning spirit craves, Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

simple robes Rich tints of beauty rare. Soon a host of lovely flowers From vales and woodland burst; But in all that fair procession The crocuses were first. First to weave for Earth a chaplet To crown her dear old head; And to beautify the pathway Where winter still did tread. And their loved and white haired mother Smiled sweetly 'neath the touch, When she knew her faithful children Were loving her

All that may be true, but I cannot recognize that the negro man is the only one who has pressing claims at this hour. To-day our government needs woman's conscience as well as man's judgment. And while I would not throw a straw in the way of the colored man, even though I know that he would vote against me as soon as he gets his vote, yet I do think that woman should have some power to defend herself from oppression, and equal laws as if she were a man.

To brighten history's page. Where labor faints and bows her head, And want consorts with crime; Or men grown faithless sadly say That evil is the time. There is the field, the vantage ground For

She married Mr. Gundover's Dick.

Slavery was a deadly cancer eating into the life of the nation; but, somehow, it had cast such a glamour over us that we have acted somewhat as if our national safety were better preserved by sparing the cancer than by cutting it out.

In the new era of your life, Bring love for hate, peace for strife