mantic, quaint or picturesque, in
these passages, we grant you. To those who have fed on the rhapsodies
of a certain school of fiction they will seem vulgarly commonplace. But
their practical good sense is indisputable, and they illustrate the
characteristics of Frederika Bremer as a writer. They point to her
combination of domesticity, household economy, and imagination; to the
alliance between poetry and prose which strengthened her vivid genius.

The great object which she set before herself, after she had arrived at
a full understanding of her powers, was the emancipation of her sex from
the thraldom imposed upon it by tradition and conventionalism, and more
definitely, the alteration of the Swedish law so far as it pressed
harshly and unjustly upon women. She desired, her sister tells us, that
women, like men, and together with them, should be allowed to study in
the elementary schools and at the academies, in order to gain
opportunities of securing employment and situations suitable for them in
the service of the State. In her opinion it was a grave injustice to
deny them, even such as were endowed with great talents and brilliant
intellectual powers, such opportunities. She was fully convinced that
they could acquire all kinds of knowledge with as much facility as men;
that they ought to stand on the same level, and to prepare themselves in
the public schools and universities, to become lecturers, professors,
judges, physicians, and official functionaries. She predicted that if
women were as free as men to gain knowledge and skill, they would, when
their capacity and indispensableness in the work of society had
obtained more general recognition, be found fitted for a variety of
occupations, which were either already in existence, or would be
required in future under a more energetic development of society; and,
finally, she maintained with warmth and eloquence that woman ought to
have the same right as man to benefit her native country by the exercise
of her talents.

* * * * *

In the autumn of 1848 Frederika Bremer left home, paying first a visit
to her old friend and teacher, the Rev. Peter Boeklin, and afterwards
proceeding to Copenhagen. In the following year she made several
excursions to the Danish islands, and then, by way of London, directed
her steps to New York, anxious to study the social condition of women in
the United States. She remained in the great Western Republ