Chapter VII: Part 7

Yet the world is much indebted to that woman. She was to her husband what the cipher is after the figure one. Alone, it is a unit; with the cipher by its side, it becomes ten.

She was the wife of John Flaxman, the Sculptor.

"Down with the Austrian woman," shouted the infuriated mob of Paris, supposing that they saw before them the ill-fated Marie Antoinette. An officer corrected their mistake, and the lady, just rescued from the most terrible of deaths,--that of being torn to pieces by savages,--said to him, "Why undeceive them? You might have spared them a greater crime."

She was the same, who, when asked her name and rank before the revolutionary tribunal, replied, with dignity, "I am Elizabeth of France, the aunt of your king."

She was compelled to witness the execution of twenty-four of her fellow-prisoners, and then met her own death without a complaint.

Among savage nations what could be more terrific than a volcano? And when, in addition to its natural mysteries, a cunning priesthood has invested it with the attributes of a malignant and revengeful deity, who but an enlightened and civilized person would dare to approach it? It was _tabooed_, and whoever insulted it, would be destroyed by its shower of liquid fire.

It is hard to shake off the prejudices and superstitions of a life- time. Yet Kapiolani, a woman of Hawaii, who had already done much to raise the character of her countrymen, set the heathen priests at defiance, declared the volcano to be the work of a merciful God, and boldly descended some distance into its crater. There she composedly praised the Lord in the midst of one of His wonderful works. The effect of her faith upon the minds of her countrymen was wonderful.

"In all that is known of Assyria, the most ancient empire of the earth, every extant fragment, moral or material, bears evidence of a sex to which that land of wonders owes the immortality of its grandeur. The name of Semiramis has preserved (what Sardanapalus could not destroy, nor Cyrus bury under the ruins of Babylon,) the memory of the greatest combination of wealth, power, art, and magnificence, which the world had till then witnessed, or has since conceived. For the greatest capitals of the most powerful and refined of modern states, supposed to have reached the acme of civilization, have but one epithet to mark their supereminence; and Rome and London (in boast, or in reproach,) have each been called the Babylon of their own proudest times.

"Babylon, with its hundred gates and towers, was founded by a woman of low origin and destitute youth, who attained to supreme power by her genius alone; and though all that has been ascribed to her may not be strictly true, though Diodorous Siculus in his enthusiasm may have exaggerated, and Ctesias may have too vividly colored his brilliant delineations of her greatness, yet that such a woman lived and reigned in Assyria, that she founded its capital, and influenced her age by her works and her talents, that she built cities, raised aqueducts, constructed roads, commanded great armies in person, and, both as conqueror and legislator, was among the earliest agents of Asiatic civilization, there remains no room for historic doubt.

"Her passage over the Indus, her conquests on its shores, the brilliant triumphs she obtained abroad, the astute wisdom with which she met conspiracy at home, and the bold confidence she expressed in the decisions of posterity, are stubborn facts. These obtained for her the sympathy of the greatest character and conqueror of a nearer antiquity; but Alexander, taking Semiramis for his model, vainly tried to restore her gorgeous city, on her own plans, and with her own views.

"Posterity has nobly ratified the appeal of Semiramis to its verdict. At the end of three thousand years, her life and character have been taken as the inspiration of its genius, and the spell of its attraction. Semiramis, however, has paid the penalty of her sex's superiority, and has been the mark of calumnious pedantry through succeeding ages."

*Since the above was in type, Mlle. Nilsson has several times sung "Way down upon the Swanee River" at her concerts.