us remember that no purer color could have been preserved in the
Thermopylae--if the heart has been hard, that a softer one would have
been surely defeated and we disadvantaged. Well could we afford to abide
in the twilight-land when such struggle was going forward in our behalf,
when the sunshine was descending upon such seedtime of the ages--to
whose harvest we are drawing nigh.

The sceptre of Supreme Use on the earth is to the hand that is sovereign
for that use. In its day every other power is subordinate to that, for
it is the nature of sovereignty to be unitary, whether lodged in an idea
or a person. It is because of this that personal sovereignty has been
indispensable to human progress. Nothing could reign over the strong,
undeveloped, turbulent brute life of the early and middle ages but the
tremendous will and self-love of a man great according to his
time--Charlemagne, Peter of Russia, Henry of Navarre.

And shall we complain that a development is slow which began with a
Soudanese, a Papuan, and gives us now a Ruskin and an Emerson--that a
career is tedious which opened, if you please, on Ararat, and has
trailed its waxing splendors up to the Free American States--the
libraries, the art galleries, the penetrating humanities which
characterize the nineteenth century? For one, I cannot. Beulah has stood
adjourned from Eden till now--wisely, needfully adjourned; and woman
will enter its boundaries gratefully and gracefully, as a queen waited
for and desired: grateful for the gift to the One who gave it in the
Great Distribution--graceful in the reception of a right from him whose
ages of struggle have made smooth her road to it.

What will she be therein? What will her life be? I close my eyes to the
Actual around me, and I see her in that high land whose plains spread
above the mountain peaks that surround us here. I see a creature whom
the poets have sung, the artists have painted and chiselled, and the
common heart of mankind has longed for, prayed for, and, in its hours of
high communion, has trusted and believed in with the utter faith of a
child in its mother's love. I see a being whom the pure, divine
Imagination, the eye of God dimmed in man, has foreseen.

I see her not a dream--not an airy form haunting the unreal walks of
night, to vanish when cockcrow recalls us to the cares of household
life, the fields of labor, the paths of effort. No, but an enduring,
very real, very practical embodiment of t