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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

We would like to enlarge upon this era of good feeling of our Howells, War­ners, Holmes, and all others of our authors, men and women; but the time is too short, and we can only breathe the wish that now the practicability of the East, the senti­ment of the South, and the vigor of the West are combined, that no one section will be overbalanced by the other, but that with the strong warp of the North, filled in with the sparkle of the West, and shot with the beauty and colored with the warmth of the South, our nation may weave a garment fit for divinity to wear. A nation is a moral person, and to the authors is the soul of the people committed. We are imper­fect; our mathematics as yet form but broken arcs, but time will shape them into perfect rounds. The heroic here is often too hard, the high too lofty, but the effort ascends to God, and will bless us by and by.

I have attempted to show you the qualities of each section, and now that we are united it remains for the future to decide the possibilities of American literature. Columbus found a new world, and Galileo found new heavens, and we with the micro­scope lay bare the secrets of nature, send messages upon the lightning with heaven’s own bolt, bind the ends of the earth together; our knowledge of the conservation of energies makes eternity confirm the conception of the hour and time is no more. Foreigners look in vain for the standing-army of the United States, for our nation marshals her hosts in the hearts of her people, proclaiming that earth did rise and heaven did bend. America, sitting in the barge of state in Columbus fountain, facing the statue of Liberty, shows woman’s elevation ever is man’s, too. This consumma­tion of science united with spirit Homer foretold mystically in his conception of God in man. Isaiah foretold Christ’s reign on earth; Dante saw on top of Mount Purga- toria where a woman led him up, for when woman rises man follows. On our own new America we go not back to the mythical past for the Golden Age, but as Christ taught us Heaven is now, and the Golden Age of Love is ours, which began in the night of the Nativity, was hastened when Capt. John Smith and Miles Standish brought the gos­pel of liberty to our shores, was confirmed when the shackles of slavery fell from every hand in our Union, and when R. E. Lee signed the treaty of peace that binds North, South, East, and West in bonds of union that Puritan and Cavalier, not even Washing­ton and Franklin, could understand; for they read not the liberty of the Gospel as did our Christian heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, who have left with us the pattern of heroes of the greatest Christian drama that has ever been acted upon the stage of history.