strength, and skill;
     A perfect woman, nobly planned,
     To warm, to comfort, and command
     And yet a spirit still, and bright,
     With something of an angel light.—­Wordsworth.

“Man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of the man,” says the great Book.  This is so true that most of the charities and mercies for which mankind gets credit in his own moral intelligence are inspired by the charitable and merciful attributes so characteristic of true womanhood.  Campbell, in the “Pleasures of Hope,” speaks thus of the Garden of Paradise: 

     The world was sad—­the garden was a wild,
     And man, the hermit, sighed, till woman smiled.

And lovely woman has smiled forever.  Into the lot of life she has put all that has endeared it or made it tolerable; into the hope of the hereafter she has ever breathed the breath of life and kept it a living force.  Besides the charms she has for man as a thing of superexcellent beauty, woman has ever held him in the second greatest debt he owes.  She teaches him, not less, a greater debt (to God), and brings him before that Chief Creditor with little thought of her own dues.  Upon

A SUBJECT SO PLEASANT TO MAN,

it is not strange that he has spent his days in framing speeches to reward the admirable devotion of woman, and it is pleasant to believe the object of those encomiums has received them as the most desirable form of remuneration.  She has listened to his praise with beating heart, and blossomed into greater loveliness.  She has had no greed of money, save as it would array her in beauteous raiment, that she might better guard the love she has won; she has had little ambition, save as she might be of service to her mate, whose unquiet soul has never ceased its

PLUNGING INTO THE NIGHT OF DESTINY,

the storm of life.  But she has had great powers of love, great powers of sacrifice, great depths of forgiveness, great fountains of tears—­those still waters where bathes the human soul and rises clean before God’s sight.  “Women are the poetry of the world, in the same sense that the stars are the poetry of heaven,” says Hargrave; “clear, light-giving, harmonious, they are the terrestrial planets that rule the destinies of mankind.”  “Man,” says Washington Irving, “is the creature of interest and ambition.  His nature leads him forth into the struggle and bustle of the world.  Love is but the embellishment of his early life, or a song piped in the intervals of his acts.  But a woman’s whole life is

A HISTORY OF THE AFFECTIONS

the heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures.  She sends forth her sympathies on adventure, she embarks her whole soul in the traffic of affection; and, if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless, for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”  “O, if the loving, closed heart of a good woman,” cries Jean Paul Richter, “Should open before man, how much controlled tenderness, how many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues, would he see reposing therein!” “Honor to women!” sings his brother-countryman,