Mrs. Glover may have admired the courage and energy of those who were ready to do battle for their convictions, but her concept of manfulness led her to a far different conclusion from Parkman’s. Through the logic of her own Christian convictions she was eventually to arrive at the point where she would give her chief admiration to the spiritual hero who has sufficiently conquered himself to turn the other cheek.

Later in the century Gerard Manley Hopkins, with a vigor equal to Parkman’s but with a good deal more perceptiveness, wrote of the Christ who “knows war, served this soldiering through,” and explained the soldier as spiritual metaphor.⁵⁰ It was as metaphor that the fighting man, and especially the heroic leader, appealed to Mrs. Glover. Her verses celebrate majors, colonels, and—above all—generals, and one catches in these symbolic figures the hint of her own coming generalship. Margaret Fuller had seen no reason why a woman should not be a sea captain if she wished, and one might say that Mary Baker was born to lead an army.

Yet in 1848 all this was undeveloped, prophesied only in an occasional flash of poetry. That was the year Elizabeth Blackwell won the degree of M.D. and thus became the first woman physician of modern times, but Mrs. Glover still thought of becoming a piano teacher.

That was also the year of the Communist Manifesto and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, of the Chartist movement in England and the Free Soil movement in America, of the California Gold Rush and the tide of Irish immigration. Moved by the desperate plight of the Irish peasant in the potato famine, Mrs. Glover had written in the September, 1847, issue of The Covenant an article called, surprisingly enough, “ ‘Erin, the Smile and the Tear in thine Eyes,’ ” which bears witness to her wider interests: