Stray Thoughts for Girls

You say that my love is plain, But that I can never allow When I look at the thought for others That is written on her brow.

The eyes are not fine, I own, She has not a well-cut nose, But a smile for others' pleasures And a sigh for others' woes:

Quick to perceive a want, Quicker to set it right, Quickest in overlooking Injury, wrong, or slight.

Nothing to say for herself, That is the fault you find! Hark to her words to the children, Cheery and bright and kind.

Hark to her words to the sick, Look at her patient ways; Every word she utters Speaks to the speaker's praise.

"Nothing to say for herself," Yes! right, most right, you are, But plenty to say for others, And that is better by far.

Purity, truth, and love, Are they such common things? If hers were a common nature, Women would all have wings.

Talent she may not have, Beauty, nor wit, nor grace, But, until she's among the angels, She cannot be commonplace.

Arthur Heathcote.

The Virtuous Woman.

A FAREWELL BIBLE LESSON TO GIRLS ON LEAVING SCHOOL.

"Wisdom ordereth all things strongly and sweetly."--WISDOM viii. 1 (Vulg.).

It would be interesting to make a "Garden of Women" from the poets, collecting the pictures of "Fair Women" they have drawn for us, but I want to consider specially the ideal woman of that ancient poet Solomon, and to see how far she can be translated into modern life.

The subject ought to be considered by you who are leaving a school you have loved and valued, and which you should commend to the world, by showing that it has made you fit for home. Beaumaris School has a blank shield for its arms, with the motto, "_Albam exorna_," "Adorn the white;" you are all starting with white shields, and you can adorn the white: it is not only in Spenser that we find Britomarts. You are as much a band of champions as were King Arthur's Knights; you have all the same enemy, have made the same vows, and for a year have been in fellowship, learning and practising the same lessons: can you help feeling that there is a responsibility laid on you, to see that the world shall be the better because of you? Be like Sir Galahad with his white shield on which "a bloody cross" was signed, when he had fought and won.

You know that I admire the old-fashioned type of woman--the womanly woman,--and you will not suspect me of wishing you to start off "on some adventure strange and new," but I do want you not to be content to lead a commonplace life; you must, anyway, live your life: resolve that by God's grace you will live it nobly. You cannot alter the outward form of your life,--you will probably be surrounded by very commonplace household duties, and worries, and jars,--but you can be like King Midas, whose touch turned the most common things to gold. We have it in our power, as Epictetus tells us, to be the gold on the garment of Life, and not the mere stuff of which Fate weaves it. We can choose whether we will live a king's life or a slave's: Marcus Aurelius on his throne was a king, for nothing could conquer him; but Epictetus in chains was equally unconquerable and equally a king. We all have the choice between the Crown and the Muck Rake, and I think we sometimes turn to the straws and the rubbish, not because they are fascinating to us, but because they seem the only things open to us: we do not feel as if our lives had anything to do with Crowns. If you think of your various homes from the point of view of turning their "necessities to glorious gains," and as a field for winning your spurs, I suspect you are each feeling that this is very "tall talk" for such a commonplace home as yours. "All lives have an ideal meaning as well as their prose translation;" but you feel perhaps that you are sure to be swamped in little bothers and duties, and pleasures, and dulness and stagnation, so that you will find it hard to see any ideal meaning at all. This is not true, and to look on an ideal life as "tall talk" is a snare of the Devil; and in these days of common sense and higher education we need to guard against it, and to remember that "a thing may be good enough for practical purposes, but not for ideal purposes." "Ideal life" is not tall talk, but our plain duty, unless our Lord was mocking us when He said, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect."

To know our ideal is one step towards attaining it. "So run, not as uncertainly; so fight, not as one that beateth the air." Before taking such a definite step in life as leaving school, it would be very interesting to draw up a plan of what you would like your life to be, and also of what you hope to make of the life apparently before you, which may be very different from the life you would like. If you kept it, like sealed orders, for five years, it would be interesting to see how your views had changed, and how prayers had been answered in unexpected ways, and it would also be a solemn warning to see, as we assuredly should, that wilful prayers had been heard to our hurt.

Bacon, when he made a new start as Solicitor-General, made a survey of his life, past and future, his faults and blunders, his strong and weak points, his hopes, the books he meant to read and to write, the friends he wished to make. I am sure that thinking over our own lives as a whole would strengthen and guide us. We rush into action and fight our best, but we do not make a plan of the campaign, and thus much of our energy is wasted by misdirected effort; and, in leaving a school-life of rule and regularity, you will be much tempted to slip through the day without the safeguard of a life of Rule; but, until you are the saints you are called to be, you cannot afford to do without this help. We must remember the warning of St. Francis de Sales against playing at being angels before we are men and women.

On the other hand, you will need to guard against the temptation to make your rules unbending and inconsiderate, to follow your ideal, heedless of the fact that you thereby become tiresome to your people. How often the home people feel jealous of school, and say it has cut a girl off from her home interests, that she comes back full of outside friendships and interests and new principles. Of course she does; if not, what good would school have done her? But she ought to feel how natural and how loving is this (often unexpressed) jealousy, and, by sympathetic tact, to avoid rousing it, and not to be always thrusting school interests down home throats. The duty of a life of rule at home is all the more complex because home pleasures are duties too; if it was only a question of self-denial it would be plain sailing, but your mother likes you to go out, and your brothers want you, and if you refuse to enjoy yourself it hurts them: if you even betray that you would rather be doing something else, you spoil their pleasure, for a "martyr" to home duty is a most depressing sight to gods and men. And the complexity lies in the fact that you enjoy going, and conscience pricks you every now and then because you never read, and you seem to go through the day in a slipshod way, with no definite rule,--no daily cross-bearing, no self-restraint to give salt to the day. At school you have a definite duty of self-improvement set before you, and everything urges you to follow it. This remains a duty when you go home, but it is very hard to reconcile it with the many things that clash--not the least of these being our own laziness when the help of external pressure is taken away. You have had intellectual advantages, and you will be downright sinful if you fritter all your time away over flowers and tennis, and never read because you do not like to be thought unsociable: you are bound to improve your talents, but take it as your motto, that rules should be iron when they clash with our own wishes, and wax when they clash with those of others.

Yet we must yield sensibly, and not allow our time to be needlessly wasted--at all events, by brothers and sisters and friends. It is different with a father or mother: they are only lent to us for a part of our lives, and no memory of sensible, useful work will be to us the same pleasure in after years as the thought of the time that passed more pleasantly for a mother because we spent it in idle (!) talk, or the knowledge that a father had enjoyed the feeling that we were always at hand if he wanted us. A strong-minded woman might consider matters differently, and feel that a language learnt, or a district visited, was of more value, but we shall not be able to reason so when we see life in the new light which death throws upon it; the little restrictions of home life will then assume a very different aspect.

Unless you are driven with an unusually loose rein, you will probably be irked by having to be punctual, and to account for your letters and for your goings and comings; but if you ever feel inclined to resent it, just think what it will be when you are left free--free to be late because there is no one to wait dinner for you, free to come and go as you will because there is no one who cares whether you are tired or not; some of these days you will give anything to be once more so "fettered."

Higher education often makes girls feel it waste of time to write notes for their mothers, and to settle the drawing-room flowers: they "must go and read." Now, what mental result, what benefit to the world, will result from an ordinary woman's reading, which can, in any way, be comparable to the value of a woman who diffuses a home-atmosphere, and is always "at leisure from herself"? You know that I care very much for your reading--you will have plenty to do if you read all the books I have begged you to study--but if it gave your mother pleasure for you to be at the stupidest garden-party, I should think you were wasting your time terribly if you spent it over a book instead. Some people think ordinary society, and small talk, beneath them:--well! do not let the talk be smaller than you can help, but remember Goulburn's warning, "Despise not little crosses, for they have been to many a saved soul an excellent discipline of humility."

But to come at last to Solomon's ideal--what is our first impression of her? Surely it is strength, and we probably feel her strong-minded, and rather a "managing woman"--and, as a rule, these are not loved. I feel that she wants some sorrow to humanize her--she would hardly be sorry for less prosperous, less sensible people: the modern feeling of, "the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!" has never gone home to her; she is not like Ruskin's "gentleman" who has tears always in his eyes, in spite of the smile on his lips; she is not "quick to perceive the want" in the many lives, which are empty or crippled, though, perhaps, seemingly prosperous: things turn out well with her, and she deserves it, so the sight of her would bring home a sense of undeservingness to the less fortunate; she cannot speak so as to be "understanded of" them; she is not one of those who have learnt that "_avoir beaucoup souffert c'est comme ceux qui savent beaucoup de langues, avoir appris à tout comprendre, et à se fairs comprendre de tous_." But the virtues Solomon describes need not result in this type, which is antagonistic to us; extremes meet, and it is the exaggeration of a very lovable type--the woman who gives you the feeling of rest and protection and strong motherliness, who is as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. "The meekness and gentleness of Christ" is translated by Matthew Arnold as the "sweet reasonableness," and this makes a very lovable woman. Sweet unreasonableness makes a more taking one, but not a keeping one. Butterfly women have more fascinating ways, but Spring-time comes to an end--the day will come for all women when others will come to them to be ministered to, to be rested and soothed and raised. It is sad to watch many who have the faded pretty ways which once was all that was required of them, and who, in middle life, cannot understand why their belongings find them so inadequate! Long ago, Swift warned girls against making nets instead of cages, but they have not all learnt wisdom yet. And the main point is, not how you can get, or give, most amusement, but how you can give most comfort; and no one goes to a weak person for that. There are few things certain in life, but one of these few is, that others will come to each one of us, in doubt, in sorrow, in pain, in ignorance, and that, through negligence and ignorance of ours, they may go away uncomforted, unhelped, untaught, and this, though each one of us has it in her power to become, through God's grace, one of those Queens of Consolation of whom Dante spoke.