veritable grasp and impress of power. Some women are already made in the
image of the man they are to love before they meet him. Very wonderful,
very terrible, then, is the meeting, and it is a meeting that usually
comes too late. But oftener God gives a man a little measure of
porcelain and a handful of stars, and leaves him to make the woman he
needs for himself; and very wonderful too is that making,--though the
man will always have been the father before he was the lover.

Why, one may ponder, should a man who is great enough to mould a woman
to help him be great, not be great enough to do without her at all? Let
lovers of the unfathomable ask at the same time: Why is man, man? and
woman, woman? and what are both?

This gentle doll with the sweet breath, which he nips up in his arms and
kisses, and gives a tongue that she may talk back to him his own words,
endows with brains that she may think his thoughts,--a quaint little
helpless lovely parody of his wisdom and power; a toy, yes; a
refreshment, yes; a place of peace, yes,--but how much more! Yes, more
by all that we don't understand when we say "woman."

Why a great man should need, not a great woman, but a little woman, a
very little woman,--how is it to be explained, unless it be that woman,
however little, is mysteriously great, just because she is a woman, a
little woman? Unknown properties were wrapped up somewhere in that
porcelain; to press it with the lips is to feel strange virtue coming
into one,--the devil was in those stars.

Great men are only nourished on the elements. Woman is an element, all
the elements in one,--earth, air, fire, and water, met together in a
rose. She is a spring among the rocks, and she comes up dimpling from