And of course you dream about all this; why shouldn’t you? Who wouldn’t? But, my dear friends, dreaming is the poorest of all grindstones on which to sharpen one’s wits. And to my thinking, the rust of woman’s intellect, the canker of her heart, the “worm i’ the bud” of her noblest possibilities has been this aimless reverie; this rambling of the thoughts; this vagueness, which when it is finished, is vacuity. Let us turn our gaze inward, those of us who are not thorough-going workers with brain or hand. What do we find? A wild chaos; a glimmering nebula of fancies; an insipid brain-soup where a few lumps of thought swim in a watery gravy of dreams, and, as nothing can come of nothing, what wonder if no brilliancy of achievement promises to flood our future with its light? Few women, growing up under the present order of things, can claim complete exemption from this grave intellectual infirmity.
Somehow one falls so readily into a sort of mental indolence; one’s thoughts flow onward in a pleasant, gurgling stream, a sort of intellectual lullaby, coming no-whence, going no-whither. Only one thing can help you if you are in this extremity, and that is what your brothers have—the snag of a fixed purpose in this stream of thought. Around this will soon cluster the dormant ideas, hopes, and possibilities that have thus far floated at random. The first one in the idle stream of my life was the purpose, lodged there by my life’s best friend, my mother, to have an education. Then, later on, Charlotte Bronte’s “Shirley” was a tremendous snag in the stream to me. Around that brave and steadfast character clustered a thousand new resolves. I was never quite so steeped in reveries again, though my temptations were unusual; my “Forest Home,” by a Wisconsin river, offering few reminders to my girlish thought, of the wide, wide world and its sore need of workers. The next jog that I got was from the intellectual attrition of a gifted and scholarly woman who asked me often to her home and sent me away laden with volumes of Wordsworth, Niebuhr and the British essayists. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was another fixed point—shall I not rather say a fixed star?—in the sky of my thought, while Arnold of Rugby, to one who meant to make teaching a profession, was chief of all. Well, is it possible that any word I have here written may set some of you thinking—that’s it, _set_ you, a fixed purpose rather than a floating one—about a definite object in life toward which, henceforth, you may bend a steady, earnest gaze? I am not speaking of a thorough intellectual training only. It is rather to the life-work, which only a lifetime can fully compass, that I would direct your thoughts. Rather than that you should fail to have a fixed purpose concerning it, I would that your mental attitude might be like the one confided to me by a charming Philadelphia girl, whose letter of this morning has the following _naïve_ statement: