most daring deeds; which the
inspired prophet chooses to typify the holiest sentiments,--what new
thing is it possible to say about this theme?

Think for a moment on the history or the literature of the world. Ask
the naturalist to reveal the mysteries of life; let the mythologist
explain the origin and meaning of all unrevealed religions; look within
at the promptings of your own spirit, and this whole life of ours will
appear to you as one grand epithalamium.

The profoundest of English poets has said--

'All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.'

That life which is devoid of love is incomplete, sterile,
unsatisfactory. It fails of its chiefest end. Nature, in anger, blots it
out sooner, and it passes like the shadow of a cloud, leaving no trace
behind. Admirable as it may be in other respects, to the eye of the
statesman, the physician, the lover of his species, it remains but a
fragment, a torso.

Love is one thing to a woman, another to a man. To him, said Madame de
Stael, it is an episode; to her, it is the whole history of life. A
thousand distractions divert man. Fame, riches, power, pleasure, all
struggle in his bosom to displace the sentiment of love. They are its
rivals, not rarely its masters. But woman knows no such distractions.
One passion only sits enthroned in her bosom; one only idol is enshrined
in her heart, knowing no rival, no successor. This passion is love! This
idol is its object.

This is not fancy, not rhetoric; it is the language of cold and exact
science, pronounced from the chair of history, from the bureau of the
statistician, from the dissecting table of the anatomist. We shall
gather up their well-weighed words, and present them, not as fancy
sketches, but as facts.

This deep, all-absorbing, single, wondrous love of woman, is something
that man cannot understand. This sea of unfathomed depth is to him a
mystery. The shallow mind sees of it nothing but the rippling waves, the
unstable foam-crests dashing hither and thither, the playful ripples of
the surface, and, blind to the still and measureless waters beneath,
calls woman capricious, uncertain,--_varium et mutabile_. But the
thinker and seer, undeceived by such externals, knows that beneath this
seeming change is stability unequaled in the stronger sex, a power of
will to which man is a stranger, a devotion and