n
connected with the transition that has produced it. First comes the
whole mighty drama of love, purified[6] ever more and more, how often
from grosser feelings, yet of necessity through its very elements,
oscillating between the finite and the infinite: the haughtiness of
womanly pride, so dignified, yet not always free from the near contagion
of error; the romance so ennobling, yet not always entirely reasonable;
the tender dawn of opening sentiments, pointing to an idea in all this
which it neither can reach nor could long sustain. Think of the great
storm of agitation, and fear and hope, through which, in her earliest
days of womanhood, every woman must naturally pass, fulfilling a law of
her Creator, yet a law which rests upon her mixed constitution; animal,
though indefinitely ascending to what is non-animal--as a daughter of
man, frail ... and imperfect, yet also as a daughter of God, standing
erect, with eyes to the heavens. Next, when the great vernal passover of
sexual tenderness and romance has fulfilled its purpose, we see, rising
as a Phoenix from this great mystery of ennobled instincts, another
mystery, much more profound, more affecting, more divine--not so much a
rapture as a blissful repose of a Sabbath, which swallows up the more
perishing story of the first; forcing the vast heart of female nature
through stages of ascent, forcing it to pursue the transmigrations of
the Psyche from the aurelic condition, so glowing in its colour, into
the winged creature which mixes with the mystery of the dawn, and
ascends to the altar of the infinite heavens, rising by a ladder of
light from that sympathy which God surveys with approbation; and even
more so as He beholds it self-purifying under His Christianity to that
sympathy which needs no purification, but is the holiest of things on
this earth, and that in which God most reveals Himself through the
nature of humanity.

Well is it for the glorification of human nature that through these the
vast majority of women must for ever pass; well also that, by placing
its sublime germs near to female youth, God thus turns away by
anticipation the divinest of disciplines from the rapacious absorption
of the grave. Time is found--how often--for those who are early summoned
into rendering back their glorious privilege, who yet have tasted in
its first-fruits the paradise of maternal love.

And pertaining also to this part of the subject, I will tell you a
result of my o