imagination, is the lover or husband of her choice, and the only irresistible Choctaws to her affection, are the dimpled little daguerreotypes, whose sunny faces look up to her from her own floor. The only mission God saw fit to endow her with, was that of civilizing this private Patagonian of hers, and evangelizing these little Choctaws of her own invention; and no wider ambition would ever enter her beautiful head, had not her native instincts been grossly sophisticated by a morbid sentimentality. By natural and divine right, she fully believes in her capacity to make the individual man happy and blessed, and precisely in so far as she indulges this perfectly womanly aspiration, she must of course remain blind to the forlorn estate of the huge rest of the world.

So much in our opinion is indubitably true of woman's genius. Therefore we will let women invade the pulpit, the rostrum, the quarter-deck, and every other unwomanly place, to their heart's content; but we will do woman the justice to acknowledge, that she firmly disclaims all complicity with these vagaries, and rigidly exacts a totally distinct theatre of action.

The genius of woman differs from man's most obviously in this respect perhaps, that it is less reflective, less apt to weigh consequences; in short, more impulsive. It is easy for man to obey an external law, to shape his conduct by a wholly outward prudence or expediency. It is not easy for woman to do so. She does not cordially obey any thing but her own affections, and where these have been interested, is much too prone to renounce prudence altogether. Woman's activity dates from her affection, man's from his intellect rather. In reference to any thing to be done, man inquires whether it be true or agreeable to his intelligence; woman inquires whether it be good or agreeable to her heart. Man hears a profound voice of warning, saying, Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of this tree, for in the day thou eatest thou shalt surely die; and he consequently refrains. But woman heeds no warning voice, and merely considers whether or not the fruit be agreeable to the sight, the taste, and so forth, in order to put forth her hand and eat.

This characteristic lack of reflection in woman is the secret, no doubt, of her superior energy, of her superior practical efficiency. She is for ever busy. An idle woman, except where great wealth and grossly artificial manners have overlaid her native freshness and elasticity-is one of the rarest of sights. An idle man is one of the commonest. To lounge, to snooze, and in that snooze perchance to

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snore, is a prerogative of man. scarcely enter five houses out of ten in an afternoon, without finding some great heap of a husband or a brother gathered up upon the sofa, recruiting his overtasked forces by a comfortable sleep. How hard to rouse him from his recumbency at your entrance. First one leg shows signs of life, then an arm wakes, then the other leg, then the whole body stirs, finally the huge head moves, and the entire drowsy mass erects itself, dimly acknowledges the gas-light, yawns once or twice, and after all this preliminary flourish very probably sinks back again to repose. Clearly man is not handsome in himself, or when uninspired by woman. could imagine that this had been once the sleepless lover that talked the moon down the western steeps, and swore an eternal alacrity in the divine art of pleasing? Where now is his alacrity? Alas! he has left it behind him in Pine-street and Pearl-street, to be put on to-morrow morning to entertain those occasional western merchants, and has brought home only his relentless tedium to bestow upon his habitual wife and little ones. Who can wonder that the dullest round of lectures or the least vivacious of theatricals prove so attractive when compared with this tedious domestic paralysis?

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It is not so with the other sex. I mean that it is a very much less common thing to see an indolent, self-indulgent woman, than it is to see a man of that sort. Every one knows individual women, possibly, who are untrue to the characteristics of their sex, victims of absurd fashion, distorted by a fatal luxury out of feminine health and grace. But the rule with woman is unceasing activity. The plain reason is, that her action dates so exclusively from herself, is motived so much more from her affections than from her intellect. It is always the sunlight of affection which kindles her energy, while the poor moonlight of the intellect enlivens man's. Man feels impelled to seek subsistence, physical and social. He has great powers to overcome and clothe with his livery, the powers of earth and air, and the forces of the human mind itself. These are his destined ministers, but their reduction to his service is slow and wearisome. He has perpetually to remember, and invent, and contrive a thousand modes of progress. He has slowly to sift the teachings of a wide experience, and garner them up in laws and statutes. He has to appoint bounds for this thing and that, to encourage industry, to discourage vice and idleness, to punish crime. He has to defend himself from aggression, to enlarge his territory when population

presses on the means of subsistence, to foster education, to establish commerce, to promote religion, to sustain international justice. All this indicates the bent of his genius. It is an outward bent. He does battle with the aboriginal forces of nature, and makes them finally docile to his will. He is engaged in preparing a theatre of life, rather than in actually living. Thus his action is imposed by his outward necessities, instead of his inward taste or inspiration. It accordingly consumes instead of refreshes him. He waters the accursed sod with his tears, and earns his bread in the sweat of his brow. Undoubtedly it is for his good that the ground is accursed, as the good book tells us. Because if nature brought forth spontaneously to man, if it required no culture, but supplied all his wants at sight or on demand, why then, manifestly, the resources of his genius would have remained for ever unknown. In that case his faculties, for lack of something to call them forth, would have remained for ever hidden from his consciousness, and he would accordingly have gone down to the grave a mere pampered menial of nature, unconscious of God, and indifferent to any life but the sensual one. All this is sublimely true. But it is none the less true at the same time, that the progress of human development is a slow and painful one, and that poor man, meanwhile, being ignorant of the glory that is in store for him, and knowing only the toilsome experience by which it comes about, often sinks down in utter weariness, or renounces life itself in hasty and untaught despair.

But woman's activity leaves her refreshed, because she really lives instead of only prepares to live. For it is very curious and beautiful to observe, that just Vin so far as man by his stalwart might

subdues the domain of nature to himself, woman steps in to glorify it by her enchantments. The aim of all man's exertion since the beginning of history, has been to conquer himself a home upon the earth, nor will he ever flag in that career, until he has secured one proportionate to his powers; that is to say, a home which shall be coextensive with the uttermost bounds of space, and to which every realm. of nature will bring its glad and lavish tribute. But wherever he halts for a night in this career, wherever he establishes a temporary home to inspirit him against the fatigues of the still beckoning to-morrow, there woman comes to pitch the white tent of her innocence beside him, and make his otherwise inevitable wilderness blossom like the rose. His work has ever been that of the hardy pioneer, stretching forth into the savagery

of nature, and rescuing it from the grasp of her own incompetent offspring, the bear, the fox, and the serpent. Her work has ever been that of turning the rude domain thus snatched from nature, into a smiling and blooming home. For man, with the immense love of dominion which characterizes him, would pause nowhere, but go on to oversweep and consume the whole earth, were it not for these angel arms of woman binding him to stay and cultivate his present possessions, that so his future conquests might be the more secure. The rude conqueror he! She, the builder up and fashioner of his conquests! For this is the vital difference of the pair, that man for ever asks more, while woman is always intent upon making the most of what she has. Man is a perpetual seeker, woman turns whatsoever she finds into a present use and profit. Man's eye is fixed upon the future, woman's upon the present. He sweeps the heavens with his gaze, to see what fairer worlds invite his adventure; she quietly unpacks the trunk of his observation, and appropriates whatever available results it contains, to the improvement of his present abode.

And

We are in the habit of saying that home is the true sphere of woman. the saying is just, provided we truly interpret the idea of home. If home be a place of bondage for woman, if it be the mere skulking place of avarice, debauchery, or other uncleanness; if it be the throne whence some base menial, elevated into the prerogatives of a husband, fulminates his sovereign pleasure; then it is no place for woman. Then woman

is bound by fidelity to her sex, or what is the same thing, by her own selfrespect, to abhor and flee such a home. The laws, perhaps, may not this year justify the step, but the private sentiment of the community is every day getting so clear, so pronounced on this subject; is getting in fact so public, that the mere laws must soon reflect it, and no flagrant husband, knowing his own disloyalty, will venture meanwhile to encounter the cdium of compelling his wife's return under such circumstances.

But with this proviso, the observation is just. Home is the true sphere of woman. What is home? It is the shrine of man's freedom; it is the seal which society sets to the private or individual sacredness of its members. Society reckons all her members sacred, in proportion to the universality of their function. In an incipient stage of society, the priestly and the warrior functions are the most universal, as the one class educates the nation, and the other defends it from foreign oppression

And in a transition stage of society like ours, the commercial class exercises the most universal function, because now the problem of humanity is to destroy existing nationalities, or those things which J divide the brotherhood of man, and fuse mankind into one grand unitary family. And commerce is effectually promoting this end. Hence the commercial class is now chiefly in honor. No matter how soulless a clod the individual merchant may be, and however impracticable a subject he may prove to your mere pedantic and dilletante uses, still his function is superb, and both state and church, accordingly, by an infallible instinct, lavish upon him their tenderest caresses. They give the merchant the best home of any man in the community, and celebrate his births, marriages and deaths with a gusto that somewhat affronts the uninstructed understanding.

Now the meaning of this home is freedom, is independence of foreign constraint, is the ability to obey one's own inspirations exclusively, or fulfil one's own pleasure. At home one can wear the old coat, or no coat at all; can lie on the floor and play with the children all day; can dance, and whistle and sing out of tune, can ride on the ballusters, can talk bad grammar, or indulge the most revolutionary expressions, without any one having the right to complain, which every one would have if he did these things in public or on the street. Home is thus the sanctuary of the private man, the sphere of one's true or characteristic development, the place in which he acts for himself, and not from the inspiration of society. But, notoriously, man very sparingly enjoys this refuge of home. He is out in the tent, in the field, in the workshop, the factory, the study, the office, the desk, wholly intent upon extending the dominion of society over nature. Society claims all his energies to enlarge her own borders, and he has no time, comparatively, to build up this immortal sanctuary of home. Now it is woman who has here stood him instead. She has been the divine menstruum, or solvent, to turn all the crude ore of his enterprise into most fine gold. Man has been so much the creature of society, so much the slave of necessity and duty, so much the mere statesman, lawyer, clergyman, shopkeeper, tradesman, ploughman, soldier, sailor, that he would have utterly forgotten his original manhood, his true spontaneous life, had not woman blissfully enshrined it for him. She has ever been the casket of his privacy, the shield of his true individuality, the guardian of his essential humanity, keeping it bright and unsullied for him until such time as

he leaves off serving society, or the finite, and is ready to serve only God, or the infinite. While man has been sunk in deep sleep, or a profound unconsciousness of his essential nature and attributes, woman has been steadfastly garnering it up, and illustrating it under all the forms of her characteristic activity.

The theory of all our distinctively masculine activity is, that it obeys a purely outward stimulus, and hence is convertible with mere toil. Man always works under some constraint of necessity or duty; works with a view to achieve or maintain some purely outward end, such as wealth, or an eminent social position for himself and family, or distinguished professional success. Society bounds his aspiration. The demands of society are primarily imperative upon him, and hence, even at his best estate, he has not the serene and disengaged air of a son of the house, but rather the abject and tired and spiritless demeanor of a hired servant. He is not working from life, but to it. He is not bringing forth, as yet, from the depths of divinity within him, the miracles of art and of beautiful fellowship, which shall one day make life an enchantment; he is serving the needs of his purely natural and social life, protecting his body against the inclemency of nature, and winning his upward way to the recognition of his fellow-men. Of course we speak here of the rule and not the exception. The privileged members of society, they who are already secure of her favor, have time undoubtedly to prosecute all the arts by which life is refined of its primal grossness. And occasionally, moreover, divinity, as if tired of waiting for the slow obedience of nature and society, flings forth some brilliant specimen, whom we name genius or inspired person, because he anticipates the general destiny, and is seen to work and act from an ideal force, from an inward life, which uses nature simply as a ministering servant. But these are the exceptions. The rule runs as we have read it, that man's activity in the general has always obeyed the spurs of necessity and duty.

Now we all know that woman's activity has not been of this sort. Her temper has never been one of progress, but of enjoyment. What she aspires to has never been the conquest of new territories, but rather the improvement of those already possessed. She ha not found her happiness in the pursuits of wealth, learning, or political power, but only in developing the household humanities, or brightening the best bliss hitherto known to the human heart, that namely, which is sheltered within the four walls of home.

In a word, she has found both her truest happiness and her truest dignity in fulfilling the part of wife, or ministering angel to man. For woman is woman only in order that she may be wife, only in order that she may be the true helper and inspirer of man: and this is the theme to which we have hitherto been simply preluding.

Woman is by nature inferior to man. She is his inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength. It is easy to quarrel with the fact, but it is quite impossible to dispute it. It is easy to pronounce it a very scandalous and flagitious fact if you please, but there the fact stands nevertheless, full of a quiet contempt of your petulance. For the fact is wholly unborn of human legislation. No man's wit ever fashioned it. It took place by no votes, but by the absolute decree of nature. Gravitation is not a whit more undeniable. Electricity is not a whit more respectable. And facts of this natural pith and reality must necessarily smile at quarrelsome persons. They are facts utterly above the sphere of will, denying the power of will even to modify them, and like all such facts, are inwardly replete with a goodness and wisdom which always mean laughter and ridicule to unreasonable or fussy people.

This foolish quarrel with woman's natural inferiority to man, proceeds upon an exaggerated notion of nature, or what is the same thing, a defective estimate of spiritual existence. Our modern amazons suppose, when you speak of woman's natural inferiority to man; when you say that she has less passion, less intellect, and less physical force, that you depress her in the scale of being, that you rob her of so much absolute life. But this is the gravest of mistakes. The truth is exactly otherwise. Our passions, our intellect, and our physical force are precise ly the things which finite us, and in proportion as we are identified with them, in proportion as we feel ourselves included in them, is this finiting influence felt. In this fact we find the reason of the instinctive shame a man feels when he is praised for his natural endowments, and of the universal contempt he encounters whenever he sets himself to boast of these things. When you praise a man for his great goodness of heart, or the power of his intellect, or for any merely physical perfection, you fill him with an inward discomfort proportionate to his true manliness; you drive all his good angels away from him, and leave him stripped of the sheltering garments of modesty. And if a man himself come to you glorying in his emotional, or intellectual, or physical

differences from other men, it is of no consequence to you whether the literal facts be as he alleges or not; the man himself strikes you as an unparalleled donkey, whom it were good instantly to cudgel out of that conceit. We repeat it: no matter whether a man's superiorities be actually true or not to our conviction, we instinctively revolt at his being aware of them in any such sense as to take credit to himself on account of them. And the only reason of this instinctive revolt is, that our natural endowments, however comparatively great they are, are not the just sources of our pride, because they are not the true sources of our life. Nature furnishes an admirable platform for the revelation of our life, but it by no means constitutes the life. God alone, or infinite goodness, truth and beauty, is our life, and this surprising pomp and affluence of Nature furnish only the mould or matrix of its perfect development. Hence our natural endowments, if we identify ourselves with them, only obscure our essential infinitude. And only in proportion as we disclaim their subjection, or what is the same thing, reduce them to our subjection, and become ourselves obedient to divine ideas, the ideas of a supersensuous goodness and truth, do we put on an immortal consciousness, and ally ourselves with Life.

Hence in ascribing to woman a natural inferiority to man, we by no means seek to depress her in the scale of being, but on the contrary to exalt her. It is this natural inequality of the sexes besides, which constitutes the true ground of their union, and enables woman to be the fountain of unmixed blessing she is to man. If she had been equal to man in passion, in intellect, and physical strength, her own distinctive attributes would have been overlaid. She must inevitably have lacked in that case, all those delicious weaknesses and softnesses which are the outward badge of her inward sweetness, and which constitute the arms of her omnipotence to the imagination of man. In short she must have ceased to attract man, have ceased to open the fountains of the ideal within him, and consequently all that divine poetry of the heart which now blossoms in the beautiful relation of husband and wife, and bears such exquisite fruit in that of parent and child, and the other social relations contingent upon that one, would have been for ever unknown.

Suppose for a moment that woman had been naturally equal to man. Suppose that she exhibited his devouring passions, his grasping intellect, his rude physical might, which is competent to rend the

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oak, and bring the wild bull to his knee. Suppose in fact that she were another man in temper and genius, another man in all the voluntary attributes of man. What sort of a courtship must she have provoked from him? He would have attacked her as he now attacks a rival power, with sword and pistol by his side, amidst the blowing of trumpets, and all the other fanfaronade of righteous war. He would have besieged her like a fortress, mining her foundations, sapping her outworks, leaping her trenches, scaling her ramparts, slaying her garrison, and subjugating her to his compulsory servitude, not as now exalting her to his social equality. And then imagine the children of such a courtship, Alack! alack! what litany would be long enough to recite their abominations! A sprinkling of girls-what could be called girls, perhaps, great muscular jades as agile as wild-cats, and yet more mischievous and fiercemight slip into the first generation, but every successive one, as an Irishman might say, would be boys alone, boys of both sexes.

What is it that man likes in woman? It is the exact opposite of himself. Contrast or opposition is the secret of their union. She is adorable to him precisely in the degree that she is unlike him. Thus you often observe that where the man is a huge powerful creature, with a great shaggy head and mane, and limbs like leviathan, suggesting only thoughts of violence and war, he is sure to aspire only after the daintiest and delicatest of women, as feeling that so rude a soil needed the ornament and apology of such a flower. Or if on the other hand, he himself approach the borders of womanhood in his physical structure, being a small, delicate, subtle organization, suggesting thoughts of pure and refined delights, then he will aspire only to his natural parallel in the other sex, and will blissfully woo and win and wear the sturdiest and most sinewy of dames. It is simply an illustration of the law of the contact of extremes, which binds a masculine minus to seek his complement in a feminine plus: and vice versa.

This precisely then is what man finds in woman, the satisfaction of his own want, the supply of his own lack. And in order to be thus much to him, she must first of all be intrinsically distinct from him. Man does not want what he already is. Excessive supply in any sphere produces a deficient demand. cordingly man being already full of passion, intellect, and physical strength, does not covet those things in woman. She has all these things to be sure in

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her degree, but they do not make up her womanhood. They are what she has in common with man. But she is something vastly beyond these things, something which he is not, and which, therefore, claims his boundless homage. She is above all things else, a form of personal affection. Man aspires to the infinite, woman loves the infinite in the finite. Her genius is not passional, is not intellectual, is not mechanical; it is purely personal. Her aim in life is not to gratify her passions, is not to enlarge her intellect, is not to perform great actions, though, of course, all these issues take place incidentally; but simply to love and bless man. Her mission, as it is called, is not to promote the spread of science and art, is not to do battle with ignorance and superstition, is not to wrest the great field of nature from the dominion of savage beasts; it is all simply to refine and elevate man. Her passions, her intellect, and her activity, unlike man's, do not carry her abroad over all the earth, to devour, and consume, and lay waste; they are all concentrated in this one most definite pursuit, the culture of man himself. This it is which makes her so eminently practical, which keeps her from ennui and dyspepsia, and every form of spiritual fidget. This it is which makes her so complete and self-contained a person, so serene and beautiful a power; this is the true secret of her charm, the sure argument of man's deathless worship. How she penetrates his inmost being with the subtle aroma of her presence, and awakens long echoes of delight which seem to stretch onward to infinity! A something quite infinite attaches to her. Enchantment waits upon all her steps. She adds splendor even to the day, she lends color and fragrance even to flowers, and turns the innumerable stars of heaven into similitudes of her matchless perfection. Her looks are nectar, and all her words ambrosia upon which the gods are nourished. She is so self-centred, her aim is so single and definite, that all her action and motion are instinct with faultless grace. How dear to the heart of man is this exquisite self-contentment, in which he himself is so deficient! How can he help worshipping the charming creature at his side! See how sweetly unperturbed, how calmly self-possessed she is! How modest and unconscious of observation, as if her business was not to be blessed, but only to bless, or rather to be blessed only in blessing! "I lack," he says, "this serene force, this spontaneous life that wells up so miraculously in this fair neighbor, and I would forsake all things, would gladly