f at once to your knowledge of what has been and to
your feelings of what should be. You cannot think that the buckling on
of the knight's armor by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic
fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth--that the soul's armor is
never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it
is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails.
Know you not those lovely lines--I would they were learned by all
youthful ladies of England.--

"Ah, wasteful woman!--she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay--
How has she cheapen'd Paradise!
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spill'd the wine,
Which, spent with due, respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine!" [3]

66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I believe you
will accept. But what we too often doubt is the fitness of the
continuance of such a relation throughout the whole of human life. We
think it right in the lover and mistress, not in the husband and wife.
That is to say, we think that a reverent and tender duty is due to one
whose affection we still doubt, and whose character we as yet do but
partially and distantly discern; and that this reverence and duty are
to be withdrawn, when the affection has become wholly and limitlessly
our own, and the character has been so sifted and tried that we fear
not to entrust it with the happiness of our lives. Do you not see how
ignoble this is, as well as how unreasonable? Do you not feel that
marriage,--when it is marriage at all,--is only the seal which marks
the vowed transition of temporary into untiring service, and of fitful
into eternal love?

67. But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding function of the
woman reconcilable with a true wifely subjection? Simply in that it is
a _guiding_, not a determining, function. Let me try to show you
briefly how these powers seem to be rightly distinguishable.

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the
"superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in
similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the
other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and
the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and
receiving from the other what the other only can give.

68. Now their separate characters are