The empresses who
embraced the cross converted sons and husbands. Whole calendars of
female saints, heroic dames of chivalry, binding the emblem of faith
on the heart of the best-beloved, and wasting the bloom of youth in
separation and loneliness, for the sake of duties they thought it
religion to assume, with innumerable forms of poesy, trace their
lineage to this one. Nor, however imperfect may be the action, in our
day, of the faith thus expressed, and though we can scarcely think it
nearer this ideal than that of India or Greece was near their ideal,
is it in vain that the truth has been recognized, that Woman is not
only a part of Man, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh, born
that men might not be lonely--but that women are in themselves
possessors of and possessed by immortal souls. This truth undoubtedly
received a greater outward stability from the belief of the church
that the earthly parent of the Saviour of souls was a woman.
The Assumption of the Virgin, as painted by sublime artists, as also
Petrarch's Hymn to the Madonna, [Footnote: Appendix B.] cannot have
spoken to the world wholly without result, yet oftentimes those who
had ears heard not.
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