n, can never be cancelled,
introduces a distinctively feminine condition into the wondrous chemistry
of the affections and sentiments, which inevitably gives rise to
distinctive forms and combinations. A certain amount of psychological
difference between man and woman necessarily arises out of the difference
of sex, and instead of being destined to vanish before a complete
development of woman's intellectual and moral nature, will be a permanent
source of variety and beauty as long as the tender light and dewy
freshness of morning affect us differently from the strength and
brilliancy of the midday sun. And those delightful women of France, who
from the beginning of the seventeenth to the close of the eighteenth
century, formed some of the brightest threads in the web of political and
literary history, wrote under circumstances which left the feminine
character of their minds uncramped by timidity, and unstrained by
mistaken effort. They were not trying to make a career for themselves;
they thought little, in many cases not at all, of the public; they wrote
letters to their lovers and friends, memoirs of their every-day lives,
romances in which they gave portraits of their familiar acquaintances,
and described the tragedy or comedy which was going on before their eyes.
Always refined and graceful, often witty, sometimes judicious, they wrote
what they saw, thought, and felt in their habitual language, without
proposing any model to themselves, without any intention to prove that
women could write as well as men, without affecting manly views or
suppressing womanly ones. One may say, at least with regard to the women
of the seventeenth century, that their writings were but a charming
accident of their more charming lives, like the petals which the wind
shakes from the rose in its bloom. And it is but a twin fact with this,
that in France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development
of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an
electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is
elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women
were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history.

Patriotic gallantry may perhaps contend that English women could, if they
had liked, have written as well as their neighbors; but we will leave the
consideration of that question to the reviewers of the literature that
might have been. In the litera