f
mankind." "Man," says Washington Irving, "is the creature of interest
and ambition. His nature leads him forth into the struggle and bustle of
the world. Love is but the embellishment of his early life, or a song
piped in the intervals of his acts. But a woman's whole life is

A HISTORY OF THE AFFECTIONS

the heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it
is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her
sympathies on adventure, she embarks her whole soul in the traffic of
affection; and, if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless, for it is a
bankruptcy of the heart." "O, if the loving, closed heart of a good
woman," cries Jean Paul Richter, "Should open before man, how much
controlled tenderness, how many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues,
would he see reposing therein!" "Honor to women!" sings his
brother-countryman,

SCHILLER;

"they twine and weave the roses of heaven into the life of men; it is
they that unite us in the fascinating bonds of love; and, concealed in
the modest veil of the graces, they cherish carefully the external fire
of delicate feeling with holy hands." "Win her and wear her, if you
can," says Shelley; "she is the most delightful of God's
creatures--Heaven's best gift--man's joy and pride in prosperity--man's
support and comforter in affliction." "Her passions are made of the
finest parts of pure love," says Shakspeare. "Her commands are caresses,
her menaces are tears," says Rousseau. "She was

LAST AT THE CROSS, EARLIEST AT THE GRAVE,"

says Barrett. "Her errors spring almost always from her faith in the
good or her confidence in the true" declares Balzac. "She has more
strength in her looks than we have in our laws, and more power by her
tears than we have by our arguments," says the Duke of Halifax, a great
statesman. "All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of
woman," says Voltaire, skeptic in all else. "Women in their nature are
much more gay and joyous than men," writes Addison, "whether it be that
their blood is more refined, their fibers more delicate, and their
animal spirits more light and volatile; or whether, as some have
imagined, there may not be a kind of

SEX IN THE VERY SOUL,

I shall not pretend to determine." "It is not strange to me" says Boyle,
a good, sensible man, "that persons of the fairer sex should like, in
all things about them, that handsomeness for which they find themselves
most liked." Man revi