to the wilderness of non-existence, to be heard from
nevermore? God speed the hour!

But with all their faults, they have many and shining virtues. Though
the ideal of a Southern woman commonly received at the North and abroad,
is not true to the life, being neither so perfect nor so imperfect as
their eulogists, on the one hand, and their detractors, on the other,
would fain make it to be, there is yet much, very much, to elicit both
love and admiration in her character.

The Southern female mind is precocious, brilliant, impressible, ardent,
impulsive, fanciful. The quickness of parts of many girls of fifteen is
astonishing. I used often to think, what splendid women they would make,
with the training and facilities of our Northern home and school
education. But, as it was, they went under a cloud at seventeen,
marrying early, and either sinking into the inanition of plantation
life, or having their minds dissipated in a vain and frivolous round of
idle and selfish gayeties. I compare their intellects to a rich tropical
plant, which blossoms gorgeously and early, but rarely fruitens. The
Southern women are, for the most part, a capable but undeveloped race of
beings. With their precocity, like the exuberance of their vegetation,
and with their quick, impassioned feelings, like their storm-freighted
air, always bearing latent lightning in its bosom, they might become a
something rich, rare, and admirable; but, never bringing thought up to
the point of reflection; never learning self-control, nor the necessity
of holding passion in abeyance; never getting beyond the degrading
influence of intercourse with a race whose stolidity and servility, the
inevitable result of their condition, on the one hand, are both the
cause and effect of the habit of irresponsible power and selfish
disregard of right fostered in the ruling class, on the other--what
could be expected of them but to become splendid abortions?

There is another consideration in connection with the excessive war
spirit they have evinced, which may help to account for it. I have often
had occasion to notice the habit the educated class of Southern women
have of conversing familiarly with their male friends and relatives on
political subjects, and to contrast it with the almost total reticence
of Northern women on subjects of public interest. This, of course,
induces a more immediate and personal interest in them, and the more
intimate one's interest in a subjec