3. To a Young Lady on Leaving a Boarding-School.
You are about to leave school. The occasion is one certainly that cannot fail to awaken reflection. I suppose that no young lady, who had been at a place of education as long as you have been here, ever left it without serious thought. The excitement of the examination, the busy whirl of preparation for leaving, even the exhilarating anticipations of home-going, cannot entirely shut out from your mind the sober truth that the end of school-days is only the beginning of another career,—a career, the issue of which you can neither foresee, nor can you be indifferent to it. Let us talk a little about this.
The day on which a young man ends his College course is called, by an apparent misnomer, "Commencement" day; that is, the day of commencing, or beginning. I understand very well that the name has a definite historical origin,—that in the old English Colleges, from which our American Colleges were modelled, the young man, on this day, begins his career as a Bachelor of Arts. His academical rank "commences" and dates from this point. But there would be a beautiful appropriateness in the term, even if it had no such special historical origin. The exit from the curriculum of the College or School, is, in truth, only the entrance into a more extended course. When your studies are nominally ended, they have really only begun. The longer you live, the more will you understand that the period of school-going is not the only, or even the main time of learning. The more thoroughly you have been taught here, the more certainly will you be a learner hereafter. I want no better test of the character of a school than the extent to which the idea prevails among its pupils and alumni, that it is a place for "finishing" one's studies. The idea is on a par with that of the young Miss who reported that she had read through Latin!
There is, it is true, in this School, a definite curriculum of studies, and that curriculum you have honorably completed. You have just been received by 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 seventeen years of age. They were the best audience I ever had. Among them was not one, who did not appear to be intelligent and thoughtful, and with a mind more or less disciplined. But there were perceptible differences among them, and it is to this point that I would direct your attention. They were divided into four distinct classes, having attended the School severally one, two, three, and four years, and they were arranged before me in the order of their seniority as classes. The discourse was long and didactic, and portions of it were not easy to follow, containing a discussion of a rather abstruse point in mental philosophy. Now it seemed to me, on concluding the address, that I could have gone through that assembly, and marked with tolerable accuracy, class by class, just where each class ended and another class began, simply by what I had read in the faces of my young auditors. It was written as plainly upon those upturned faces, as was the discourse itself upon the manuscript before me. Those who had been four years in the School, undoubtedly learned manifold more from the exercise than the junior classes did. I could see it in the delivery of every paragraph. Such is the uniform result of a proper course of study. It enables the student to grasp new truths with increased ease and readiness. We, who are teachers, feel this the moment we undertake to communicate our thoughts to an audience. The consequence is, we involuntarily measure what has been done educationally for a class of young persons, by the development which has been given to their powers,—by the manifest facility which they have gained for making further gains. That young woman is best educated who is best prepared to learn.
Let me, then, renew the appeal to your own consciousness. Think for a moment upon the change which has been wrought in your own self during your career here. Compare your present self with that other self that you may remember some three or four years back. How much more you can accomplish now than you could then! How much more clearly you can follow out a train of reasoning! How much more easily you can compass an argument! How much more you can enjoy what is beautiful! How much more quickly and accurately you can remember! How much more you can command your attention! Whence this change, and what does it purport? It means that you are educated. You have now a degree of mental power that you had not then. Your own consciousness tells you that you are now just in the condition to enter upon your harvest. The field is before you. You are girded for the work. And will you now indolently lay aside the sickle, and let the golden grain fall to the ground ungathered? Could there be a more egregious mistake? Last week, I saw from my window two parent birds tempting their young fledglings from the nest. Day by day, week by week, I had seen the child-birds growing and gaining strength. Their muscles were now well developed, their bodies were clothed with feathers, they had learned to use their wings,—they could fly. Would it not have been passing strange, had they continued as they were, contented to cower and to crawl, when they had acquired the power to soar? And will you be content to remain forever only a fledgling, satisfied with having acquired the power of rising, but never actually using the wings which these years of honorable industry have given you?
Some of your sex are willing to admit the force of this argument when applied to men. A man, after graduating, is expected of course to continue his studies. His whole profession is one continued study. But somehow, it is thought, this truth does not hold good for women. Let me hope that you at least will not harbor such a notion. Whatever may be said of "women's rights," one right certainly, and one duty, is to keep yourself abreast of the other sex in continued mental growth and culture, and in general intelligence. If you would awaken true respect in my sex, and I hold it a not unworthy ambition, you must in this matter do as we do, at least as those of us do who are worth your consideration at all. You must perseveringly, every year, add to your intellectual acquisitions. You must continue steadily to grow in knowledge and mental power. Do not cease your studies, because you have ceased going to school. Manage to have some elegant accomplishment or acquisition always in hand. A woman who is wise in this matter, never passes her prime. I speak not, of course, of the decrepitude of old age and of the decay of the faculties. But so long as the faculties remain unimpaired, a woman may become, and should aim to become, increasingly attractive, as she advances in years. Poets sing of sweet sixteen. Let me assure you, a woman may be charming at sixty. Mrs. Madison even at seventy was the most attractive woman in Washington.
In society, how soon one feels the difference between a person who reads, and one who does not read. Two ladies may be of the same age. They may dress alike. They may have the same advantages of person. They may move in the same social circle. Yet you will not have been ten minutes in their society, though the conversation has been on only the most common topics of the day, before you will feel that the one woman, though at thirty or forty, is still only a superannuated school-girl, with even less resources than when she left the seminary, while the other is a delightful companion for persons of any age, with ready knowledge for whatever turn the conversation may take, and so abounding in resources as not even to be open to the temptation of making a display of them. The one can talk only so long as the conversation turns on dress, gossip, or the discussion of private character. In listening to the talk of such a woman, you hardly hear a sentence which is not based upon personalities. Her mind has not been fed and nurtured from day to day with beautiful and noble thoughts, with history and science and general knowledge. She may be amiable. She may have personal beauty. But you find her empty and vapid, and you weary of her, in spite of the very best intentions of being interested. How different the woman who, in spite of social exactions, and even of accumulating domestic duties, and of the time-consuming tax of dress, still keeps her mind fresh and growing, by means of reading and culture,—who is ever adding to her stores of knowledge some new science, to her varied skill some new attainment,—who has ever in hand some new book. It is true, indeed, that some ladies are blessed with more leisure for this purpose than others. But I fear it is not a question of more and less. It is too much a question of some and none. I hold that every woman is entitled to have, and by proper determination she may have, some time for personal improvement. Remember, we have duties to ourselves, as well as to others, and we have no duty to ourselves more sacred than this,—to rescue from our time some portion for the purpose of making ourselves more worthy of regard.