No contradiction could be made. It must have been a keen pang to Speranza's generous mind to know that her violent and seditious articles had done so much mischief to her friends. At the conclusion of the trial, Gavan Duffy was released on bail, and his subsequent successful career in Australia is a matter of public interest with which we have nothing to do. Not only did Speranza write poems for The Nation, she also wrote prose essays on the French Girondists, on Jean Paul Richter, and on other subjects. These essays were afterwards collected, and published under the title of "Men, Women, and Books." They contain many striking sentences, such as "Walter Scott taught reverence, which is the first step to faith;" "Byron spoke to the want of every young heart. His literature of despair was the anguished cry of a God-bereft humanity, seeking its lost hope and immortality. Byron's mission was to awaken, not to teach. He was the poet of doubt."
Lenette, one of Jean Paul's housewifely German heroines, she compares to "an incarnate sweeping brush, an animated floor-cloth, a living, ubiquitous duster." Of a man who marries an unappreciative wife she says, "He cannot resist the fatal miasma of the common-place, he falls into the dull abyss of mediocrity. We are not proof against any of the daily influences, however trivial, that surround us.… Let all genius remain unwed."
