Woman (La femme) / from the French of J. Michelet ; translated from the last Paris ed. by J.W. Palmer.

  • Jules Michelet
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Woman (La femme) / from the French of J. Michelet ; translated from the last Paris ed. by J.W. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    But, says the lather, whence shall I derive penetra- tion enough to find my own way, and to guide my child through so many obscurities ? Strong and genuine criticism is born of the heart, rather than the intellect; it springs from lo] alty, from the impartial sympathy we owe to our brothers of lie past and of the present. With this you will have no difficulty in tracing through history the great unchang- ing current of human morality. Will you believe one who has made the great voyage more than once ? His experience is precisely that of the voyager as he sails out of the Caribbean Sea ; at the first glance, he sees only the wide expanse of wrater; in the second, on the green field he discerns a broad band of blue; that is the immense torrent of warm floods which, crossing the Atlantic, reaches Ireland, still wrarm, and is not entirely cooled even at Brest, lie sees it perfectly, and moreover, can feel its warmth on the passage. Just so will the great current of moral tra- dition appear, if you scan the ocean of history with careful eyes. But long before we reach this elevated simplification, in which history becomes identical with morality itself, I should desire my young maiden to be pleasantly nourished with pure and wholesome reading, borrowed especially from anti- quity, from the primitive East. How happens it that we put into the hands of children the history of grown up nations only, while we leave them ignorant of the infancy and youth of the world ? If some one would collect a few of the truly spiritual hymns of the Vedas, some of the prayers and laws of Persia, so pure and so heroic, and add a few of those touch- ing pastorals from the Bible, such as the stories of Jacob, Ruth, and Tobias, he would present the young girl with an incompara- ble bouquet, whose perfume, early and slowly inhaled, Avould impregnate her innocent soul, and remain with her forever. No intricate subjects in the remote past for her; banish