the damsel from the grizzled jowl of man.

But as usual, the crowning glory of most anxious labor is to be sought
in the female characters. These are nearly all of the majestic, haughty,
and queen-like caste--tall, imperious beauties, empresses of society, to
whom men are slaves, and life a triumphal march of unbroken conquests.
So it is at least until they meet some one terrible subduer of woman--a
Guy or a Keene--in whom they recognize masterhood, and the right and
power to reign. With the last stateliness of royalty these magnificent
presences glide through the proud pomp and pageantry of their
surroundings, graceful as swans, faultless in classic form, and face as
white as Grecian marbles, domineering as sisters of Caesars, violet eyed,
statuesque, cold upon the chiselled surface, but aglow with the white
heat of feeling and forceful passion beneath. How blue are their clear
veins interlacing beneath a crystalline skin!--for their blood is a more
sublimed fluid than that which waters the clay of ordinary humanity.
They have with them an unutterable glory of conscious power, the
magnificence of a perfect, God-given nature, such a haughty spirit of
rivalless dominion as might have swelled the soul of a Jewish queen,
monarch of Israel, ruler of God's chosen people in the day of their
unbroken pride, when she felt that none greater than herself dwelt upon
the globe. But with inevitable tread approaches the universal moral
which points the tale. The measured step of the godlike hero echoeth
along the corridors. The royal maiden, hearing the ominous tramp, is
cognizant of an unwonted thrill and a sensation unfelt before. Her
prophetic instinct telleth her too truly that her wild independence is
concluded, that the day of bondage and of fetters has dawned, that the
inexorable One, who alone in all the millions of created men is able, is
even now present with, the gyves of her slavery in his hand. But the
denouement is never at the bridal altar. Our host entertaineth us with
no loves of Strephon and Phillis, nor leads beneath shady arcades to a
vine-clad cottage, wherein is love and rich cream and homemade butter.
The three sisters, the dread Moirae, in their darksome cavern, spinning
the golden thread of destiny, reel from their distaff no bright soft
film of wedded happiness. The polished metal, many times refined, would
never show half its qualities were it not subject to unwonted tests. We
suffer according to our powers