e and
Browning's mother, of whom he used to say, with a slight tremor in his
voice, "She was a divine woman," it will be by strengthening and
appealing to this element of divine motherhood in a woman's nature.

What I would, therefore, teach the girls is this: that they have got to
mother the boys, that they are the guardians of all that is best and
highest in them, of all that makes for the chivalrous American
gentleman, and that their womanhood should therefore be to them a
fountain of fine manners, of high thoughts, and noble actions. I would
rub into their very bones, if I could, the old saw I have already
quoted: "A man is what a woman makes him"; that if there were more high
womanhood there would be less low manhood; and that if the boys are rude
and rough and slangy, and loutish in their manner to women, the blame
lies with their sisters who, in their foolish fondness and indulgence,
or in their boyish camaraderie, have allowed them to slouch up into a
slovenly manhood. The man at most is the fine prose of life, but the
woman ought to be its poetry and inspiration. It is her hand that sets
its key, whether

"To feed the high tradition of the world,"

or add to its low discords. Surely Ruskin's noble words apply here: "It
is the type of an eternal truth that the soul's armor is never well set
to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when
she has braced it loosely that the honor of manhood fails"; or those
other still stronger and nobler words of Frederick Robertson's: "There
are two rocks in a man's life on which he must either anchor or split:
God and Woman."

And could we not appeal to our girls to make their womanhood a rock
which bears a light to all in peril on the rough sea of life--a light to
save from moral shipwreck and lead to the safe haven beneath the Rock of
Ages? Surely we might appeal to them, in the name of their own brothers
and others with whom they are intimately thrown, to work out these
higher possibilities of their own womanhood; not to lower it by picking
up slang words from their brothers--a woman ought to be above coarsening
and vulgarizing God's great gift of speech--not to engage in games or
romps that involve a rude rough-and-tumble with boys, which may develop
a healthy hoyden, but is utterly destructive of the gracious dignity of
the true woman; not to adopt fast ways of either dress or bearing which
lead to young men making remarks behind their backs w