hey create an healthful
atmosphere, and, associated as they are with the memory of their noble
founders, they utter to woman the inspiring summons,

"Through thy veins
The blood of Heroes runs its race!
And nobly shouldst thou brook the chains
That, for the virtuous, Life prepares,
The fetters which the matron wears,
The Patriot Mother's weight of anxious cares."

The growing elevation of your sex in popular estimation should also
encourage you, my friends, to untiring devotedness, and patient
self-culture. She, who was once regarded as but the satellite of a proud
planet, is now herself marked in the catalogue of heaven's luminaries.
Already are the names of Madam de Stael, Edgeworth, Jameson, Martineau,
and Hemans, abroad, and of Sigourney, Sedgwick, Child, Lee, and others,
in our own land, enrolled on this bright register. Nor is the moral
advancement of woman less remarkable than her literary attainments. The
Alcoran may exclude her from Paradise, and teach her that she has no
soul; practically, if not literally, it has done this. But Christianity
places her in the same high rank with man. She is an heir of the
Redeemer's kingdom. In the social edifice, she is viewed as the rich
tracery of its massive frame-work; the more graceful and delicate part,
yet as essential to the completeness of the structure, as its giant
pillars and solid masonry.

In her Constitutional Susceptibilities woman should find motives for
signal excellence. Philosophy teaches that sensibility alone will prompt
to the kind offices of Christian beneficence. Why does man pass so
often, in passive indifference, the helpless child of woe? Because
nature has not gifted him with a tender heart. He was formed to buffet
the storms of public commotion. Extreme sensibility would have made him
shrink from the encounter. But woman was endowed with a sensitive
spirit, that she might feel for the sufferer, and an active imagination,
to picture his troubles, and an ardent love, to relieve them. How can
she fail of perpetual charities?

Again, her temperament is friendly to piety. St. Augustine calls hers
the "devout sex." And meet is the appellation. For her weakness teaches
her to lean upon an Almighty arm; and her trustfulness,--so striking,
that to doubt, suspect, and despond, come, in her, only from peculiar
physical infirmity, or from a most erroneous education,--leads her to
confide in God. Add to these th