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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
makes little pinafores for the chilly children of Greenland, and sometimes forgets that charity means loving kindness, the womanly courtesy to the maid-servant and the gentle word to the man-servant.
The perfect woman shall cherish all of these, hold fast that which is good in each, and remember that she owes an equal allegiance to every part of her being. She who neglects health—some rational means of physical culture, or the like—shall reap a whirhvind of weariness and wretchedness; she who aids not beauty by all reasonable means has lost one of the strongest levers whereby to move the world. She who fails to expand her intellectual faculties unto the highest, cannot seek recognition or honor among men. The woman who slays love does ill, for, like the wounded lion, it shall turn and rend her, and leave her at last desolate, and stricken, and alone; w 7 hile for her who knows the grace of a heavenly spirit, “ her deeds shall drop as the rain, her speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass.” All these things are lovely when rightly proportioned and nicely adjusted to the eternal balance. The ancient Greeks, that most perfect race physically and mentally the world has ever known, had engraven upon the arch of their academies, that he who ran might read, this motto: “Do nothing too much,” and to we moderns this message comes today with timely warning.
The history of the world is rich with the tales of famous women who would have been beyond cavil had they but remembered, a woman to realize the highest must cultivate harmoniously her threefold being. Elizabeth, Queen of England, of whom Laud writes: “ I am proud that such a woman has lived and reigned and died in honor;” she who was rich in mind and estate, but who lacked the gentler side, whose heart was not attuned to love and whose life missed those sweet chords in its music which only a fond affection can bring. Cleopatra, who could charm the colossus Caesar, whose intellect was broad änd great, whose beautiful body was a fit temple for a noble soul—but, alas! the casket was empty of the jewel, else the world’s story had been nobler. Madame Recamier, whose gracious heart and lovely spirit made all men her knights, but who failed in that mental force which should have thrown her power into the world’s work and aided its upward and onward march. Madame de Main- tenon, whose piety was deep and sincere, but cultivated to such an excess that the god-like virtue of tolerance was forgotten, and the reign of Louis, the grand monarch, sullied with one of the darkest political crimes in history, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, whereby eight thousand faithful subjects were exiled or imprisoned. George Eliot, the brightness of whose descriptive pen we may never see surpassed, but whose intellectual faculties were allowed to exhaust and warp her nature so that her days were largely those of an unhappy invalid, and discord rang within them.
“ ’ Tis strange that a harp of a thousand strings Should keep in tune so long,”
sings the poet, and we shall only hear life’s harmony aright when the bass and the treble and the medium register shall sound aloud together in one triumphant symphony. Lord Lytton writes the praises of “ a various, vigorous, versatile mind,” and Goethe observes: “ The object of life is culture, not what we can accomplish, but what can be accomplished in us.”
Let us divide our threefold being into a sexagon—from our physical nature we shall have health and beauty, from our mental endowment knowledge and sentiment, from our spiritual side morality and piety, and cultivate each unto the utmost, but each in its due proportion. The peach that grows toward the sun’s warm kisses becomes first ripe and mellow and fragrant, but unless Phoebus travels on to touch its other side, is soon o’er-ripe and blackened and decayed. And so with us, if we let not the genial sun of culture shine upon us equally from all directions, we shall grow blackened with the vice of narrowness and littleness and scrupulosity, and fail our perfect fruitage.
The world today is, oh, so largely, what we women make it. Let us strive earnestly until all womanly vices shall cease to be.