The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 4, December, 1834Various
History
The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 4, December, 1834
Various
American literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals
Rome, notwithstanding her primeval rudeness, and the ferocity of her
wolf-nursed greatness, seems more correctly, than polished Greece, to
have estimated the "weaker vessel." Here and there, upon the storm
driven billows of her history, the form of woman is distinctly visible,
and the mother of the Gracchi still stands forth in strong relief, amid
that imagery, over which time has no power. Yet where the brute force
of the warrior was counted godlike, the feebler sex were prized, only
in their approximation to the energy of a sterner nature, as clay was
held in combination with iron, in the feet of that mysterious image
which troubled the visions of the Assyrian king.
To some of the republics of South America, the first dawn of liberty
gave a light which Greece and Rome, so long her favored votaries, never
beheld. Even in the birth of their political existence, they discovered
that the sex whose _strength is in the heart_, might exert an agency in
modifying national character. New Grenada set an example which the
world had not before seen. Ere the convulsive struggles of revolution
had subsided, she unbound the cloistered foot of woman, and urged her
to ascend the heights of knowledge. She established a college for
females, and gave its superintendence to a lady of talent and
erudition. We look with solicitude toward the result of this
experiment. We hope that our sisters of the "cloud-crowned Andes," may
be enabled to secure and to diffuse the blessings of education, and
that from their abodes of domestic privacy, a hallowed influence may go
forth, which shall aid in reducing a chaos of conflicting elements to
order, and symmetry, and permanent repose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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