She was let out too, after some severe treatment.
There was a woman who never performed any grand, heroic action, who lived a quiet, domestic life; did nothing brilliant, wrote no poems, suffered no martyrdom. For thirty-eight years she was a ministering angel to her husband; and he was not an invalid, whose caprices tried her temper, and made her life a lasting trial. On the contrary, his health was good, and his spirits ever equal.
Yet the world is much indebted to that woman. She was to her husband what the cipher is after the figure one. Alone, it is a unit; with the cipher by its side, it becomes ten.
She was the wife of John Flaxman, the Sculptor.
"Down with the Austrian woman," shouted the infuriated mob of Paris, supposing that they saw before them the ill-fated Marie Antoinette. An officer corrected their mistake, and the lady, just rescued from the most terrible of deaths,—that of being torn to pieces by savages,—said to him, "Why undeceive them? You might have spared them a greater crime."
She was the same, who, when asked her name and rank before the revolutionary tribunal, replied, with dignity, "I am Elizabeth of France, the aunt of your king."
She was compelled to witness the execution of twenty-four of her fellow-prisoners, and then met her own death without a complaint.
Among savage nations what could be more terrific than a volcano? And when, in addition to its natural mysteries, a cunning priesthood has invested it with the attributes of a malignant and revengeful deity, who but an enlightened and civilized person would dare to approach it? It was tabooed, and whoever insulted it, would be destroyed by its shower of liquid fire.
It is hard to shake off the prejudices and superstitions of a life- time. Yet Kapiolani, a woman of Hawaii, who had already done much to raise the character of her countrymen, set the heathen priests at defiance, declared the volcano to be the work of a merciful God, and boldly descended some distance into its crater. There she composedly praised the Lord in the midst of one of His wonderful works. The effect of her faith upon the minds of her countrymen was wonderful.
"In all that is known of Assyria, the most ancient empire of the earth, every extant fragment, moral or material, bears evidence of a sex to which that land of wonders owes the immortality of its grandeur. The name of Semiramis has preserved (what Sardanapalus could not destroy, nor Cyrus bury under the ruins of Babylon,) the memory of the greatest combination of wealth, power, art, and magnificence, which the world had till then witnessed, or has since conceived. For the greatest capitals of the most powerful and refined of modern states, supposed to have reached the acme of civilization, have but one epithet to mark their supereminence; and Rome and London (in boast, or in reproach,) have each been called the Babylon of their own proudest times.