public acknowledgment into the community of educated women.
But you will be false to the honorable sisterhood, false, I am sure, to
all the teachings you have received here, if you entertain for a moment
the thought that no further intellectual acquisitions are before you.
The branches which you have learned thus far are chiefly valuable to you
for the power they have given you to make still further improvement. The
studies pursued at school, and during the period of youth, are mainly
intended for promoting intellectual growth, for giving us power, for
perfecting our mental machinery. Our real acquisitions come afterward. I
speak, of course, of those who occupy the higher stations in society. To
one who has to earn his bread by mere bodily toil, the few studies for
which he has leisure in youth, must, of course, be such as are directly
serviceable in his calling. But to those who claim to belong to the
educated portion of the community, school studies are of right directed
more to the development of the mental and moral powers, than to positive
acquisition. Your instructors return you to your friends and your home
with a mind enlarged, with a taste refined, with a judgment corrected,
ready to take your place and act well your part, as an educated woman.
But remember, she is not an educated woman, who knows no more this year
than she did last. True education is growth, and it never stands still.
The tree which has ceased to grow, has begun to decay.

This, then, is the one thought that I would have you take away with you
from school. Give no place to the idea that henceforth books and study
and elegant culture are to be laid aside. It would be a dishonor to your
School, and a mistake of the first magnitude for yourself.

Perhaps you will appreciate this point more adequately, if you will turn
your thoughts inward for a moment, and reflect upon the change which
has been quietly going on in your own self and during your residence
here. One whose occupation calls him almost daily to communicate his
ideas to young persons, either by formal address, or by more familiar
ways, feels to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other person can, the
change to which I refer. I mean that increased quickness of intellectual
apprehension produced by a judicious and symmetrical course of study.
Let me give you an instance. It fell to my lot, not long since, to
address a School containing three hundred young ladies, all boarders,
all over s