ple, and compensated by her smile, man will aspire to complete
his highest destiny. Her destiny will be fulfilled with his, and in
it; his in hers, and with it. They cannot be really separated; since
woman as the inspirer and rewarder of man, in the most intense action
at the top of society, moulds him by her ideal of him reflected in
his imagination. Womanhood is by no means to be personified in the
exclusive aspect of a nurse; but as artist, teacher, law-giver,
queen, as well. The just personification of womanhood must include
the total aspects and offices of humanity. She has as good a claim as
man to them all. But let no hasty advocate insist on adding to the
totality of true and permanent features in that personification, any
of those vicious, accidental, and temporary features incident to the
imperfect stages through which humanity has been passing, and is
still passing, in its progressive evolution.

There is one respect, not often thought of, in which the various
ethnic pantheons, from those of the rawest barbarism to those of the
most intellectual civilization, possess deep interest and
instructiveness. Their leading personages, gods and goddesses, reveal
to us the chief types of human character from which they were
created. The heavens and hells of mythology are the higher and lower
reflections, or upward and downward echoes, of the earth; and the
supernatural beings who people them are idealizations of men and
women, more or less richly draped with attributes suggested by the
phenomena of the universe. The groups of feminine figures furnished
by mythology, therefore, afford a most striking exhibition of the
typical groups of women which must have been known in the
mythological ages of the world. Conceived in this way, with what
thoughtfullness we should contemplate the Graces, the Muses, the
Furies, the Fates, Nemesis, Vesta, Fortuna, Diana, Eris, Ceres, the
majestic port of Juno, the frosty splendor of Minerva, the melting
charm of Venus, the snaky horror of Medusa, Egvptian Isis, throned
among the stars, and Scandinavian Hela, crouching in her grisly
house!

It is a characteristic of satirists, in every age, that they class
women together, as if they were all alike. Every fair view of the
subject shows how false such a conclusion is. There is more
freshness, subtilty, spontaneity, variety, in womanly characters than
in manly. Their range, between the extremes of the demure and the
hoydenish, is greater.