ignore them; the sublimest charity must begin with them. They are their own
exceeding great reward; their self-sacrifice is infinite joy; and the
selfishness which discards them is repaid by loneliness and a desolate old
age. Yet these, though the most tender and intimate portion of human life,
do not form its whole. It is given to noble souls to crave other interests
also, added spheres, not necessarily alien from these; larger knowledge,
larger action also; duties, responsibilities, anxieties, dangers, all the
aliment that history has given to its heroes. Not home less, but humanity
more. When the high-born English lady in the Crimean hospital, ordered to
a post of almost certain death, only raised her hands to heaven, and said,
"Thank God!" she did not renounce her true position as woman: she claimed
it. When the queen of James I. of Scotland, already immortalized by him in
stately verse, won a higher immortality by welcoming to her fair bosom the
dagger aimed at his; when the Countess of Buchan hung confined in her iron
cage, outside Berwick Castle, in penalty for crowning Robert the Bruce;
when the stainless soul of Joan of Arc met God, like Moses, in a burning
flame,--these things were as they should be. Man must not monopolize these
privileges of peril, the birthright of great souls. Serenades and
compliments must not replace the nobler hospitality which shares with woman
the opportunity of martyrdom. Great administrative duties also, cares of
state, for which one should be born gray-headed, how nobly do these sit
upon a woman's brow! Each year adds to the storied renown of Elizabeth of
England, greatest sovereign of the greatest of historic nations. Christina
of Sweden, alone among the crowned heads of Europe (so says Voltaire),
sustained the dignity of the throne against Richelieu and Mazarin. And
these queens most assuredly did not sacrifice their womanhood in the
process; for her Britannic Majesty's wardrobe included four thousand gowns;
and Mile, de Montpensier declares that when Christina had put on a wig of
the latest fashion, "she really looked extremely pretty."