disgraced by their
fate. Are the life and happiness of the poet, of the man of genius, a
trifle? What would human society be without them? Let all who hold a
pen think of the kind hearts who, by the excitement of social
intercourse and sympathy, have preserved a whole class from
degradation and vice."

The extent to which women have been the occasions, the suggesters,
and sustaining encouragers of artistic creations in literature,
painting, sculpture, and music, will astonish any one who will take
the trouble to look up the history of it. When Orpheus found that
Eurydice was gone, he threw his harp away. Women have delighted to
administer inspiration, praise, and comfort, to great poets, orators,
philosophers, because it gratifies their natural talent for admiring,
and because they are reverentially grateful to the genius which can
so clearly read their secrets, and so powerfully portray their souls
to themselves. Sophocles, the highest Greek poet, whose firm and
delicate portraitures of feminine character were not equalled in
antique literature, must have had many admirers and friends among the
choice women of Athens. And Virgil, we cannot imagine any high-
souled, refined woman knowing the tender Virgil without a respectful
and affectionate attachment. Octavia fainted away when he read before
her his undying description of the death of Marcellus. The kiss of
Aileen Margaret on the lips of the sleeping minstrel, Alain Chartier,
is a type of woman's homage to literary genius. The same thing was
shown, a little earlier in the same century, at the funeral of
Heinrich von Meissen, surnamed Frauenlob, from the infinite praises
he had lavished on the Virgin Mary, and on the female sex in general.
After his death in the outer quarters of the cathedral at Mayence,
which were set apart for hospitality to strangers and honored guests,
a great company of women, it is related, sighing and weeping, bore
his coffin to the burial, and poured into his sepulchre such an
abundance of wine as ran over the whole circumference of the church.
Five hundred years later, the women of Mayence celebrated his memory
by tributary eulogies, and by the erection of a beautiful new
monument, faced with a marble portrait of him.

Bernardin Saint Pierre says, "There is in woman an easy gayety, which
scatters the sadness of man." It may be said, on the other hand, that
there is in the man of literary genius a masterly insight, joined
with sympathetic