a Women's College was in the air1He talked over the plan of the poem with my mother in 1839., or it may have
arisen in its mock-heroic form from a Cambridge joke,
such as he commemorated in these lines, which I found
in one of his old MS books:

Sweet Kitty Sandilands,
The daughter of the doctor,
We drest her in the Proctor's bands,
And past her for the Proctor.

All the men ran from her
That would have hasten'd to her,
All the men ran from her
That would have come to woo her.

Up the street we took her
As far as to the Castle,
Jauntily sat the Proctor's cap
And from it hung the tassel.

As for the various characters in the poem, they give
all possible views of Woman's higher education; and as
for the heroine herself, the Princess Ida, the poet who
created her considered her as one of the noblest among
his women. The stronger the man or woman, the more
of the lion or lioness untamed, the greater the man or
woman tamed. In the end we see this lioness-like
woman subduing the elements of her humanity to that
which is highest within her, and recognizing the relation
in which she stands towards the order of the world and
toward God --

A greater than all knowledge beat her down.

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