assure you, met with a hearty
welcome from me. And I can not refrain from writing to you a warm
acknowledgment of your cordial sympathy, and expressing the
pleasure with which I have read your brave words. It is true, I
look neither for praise nor blame in pursuing the path which I
have chosen. With firm religious enthusiasm, no opinion of the
world will move me, but when I receive from a woman an approval
so true-hearted and glowing, a recognition so clear of the
motives which urge me on, then my very soul bounds at the
thrilling words, and I go on with renewed energy, with hope, and
holy joy in my inmost being.

My whole life is devoted unreservedly to the service of my sex.
The study and practice of medicine is in my thought but one means
to a great end, for which my very soul yearns with in tensest
passionate emotion, of which I have dreamed day and night, from
my earliest childhood, for which I would offer up my life with
triumphant thanksgiving, if martyrdom could secure that glorious
end:--the true ennoblement of woman, the full harmonious
development of her unknown nature, and the consequent redemption
of the whole human race. "Earth waits for her queen." Every noble
movement of the age, every prophecy of future glory, every throb
of that great heart which is laboring throughout Christendom,
call on woman with a voice of thunder, with the authority of a
God, to listen to the mighty summons to awake from her guilty
sleep, and rouse to glorious action to play her part in the great
drama of the ages, and finish the work that man has begun.

Most fully do I respond to all the noble aspirations that fill
your letter. Women are feeble, narrow, frivolous at present:
ignorant of their own capacities, and undeveloped in thought and
feeling; and while they remain so, the great work of human
regeneration must remain incomplete; humanity will continue to
suffer, and cry in vain for deliverance, for woman has her work
to do, and no one can accomplish it for her. She is bound to
rise, to try her strength, to break her bonds;--not with noisy
outcry, not with fighting or complaint; but with quiet strength,
with gentle dignity, firmly, irresistibly, with a cool
determination that never wavers, with a clear insight into her
own capacities, let he