Success Quote by Washington Irving

A neat bit of romantic self-branding hides inside this apparently plainspoken line. Irving stages a refusal of the era's most marketable female currency - "beauteous looks" - and replaces it with a virtue that sounds private, moral, and therefore nobler: kindness. The phrasing matters. "Shall win my love" reads less like a confession than a rule, as if love is a prize adjudicated by a gentleman who wants to appear above vanity while still keeping the power to grant affection. The sentence flatters women by elevating character, but it also sets the terms of acceptability: be kind, be soothing, be the person who makes a man's life easier.

The subtext is as telling as the sentiment. Irving doesn't reject physical beauty so much as he claims immunity to it, which is a classic rhetorical move for writers in early 19th-century Anglo-American culture: distance yourself from the supposedly shallow world of courtship while quietly enjoying its rewards. "Kindness" is the safe virtue, socially legible and domestically useful, aligned with the period's tightening ideals of feminine respectability. It echoes the emerging "cult of true womanhood" values (piety, purity, submissiveness, domesticity), even when it pretends to offer an alternative to appearance-based judgment.

Contextually, Irving's genteel, ironic persona often toggles between sentiment and social critique. Here, the line works because it sells an aspiration - love as moral discernment - while smuggling in a hierarchy: women are evaluated, and the preferred trait is one that keeps them agreeable. It's tender, but it's also a little managerial.