few besides, should now perhaps recast some of the sentences in the
'Lilies' in a very different tone: for as years have gone by, it
has chanced to me, untowardly in some respects, fortunately in
others (because it enables me to read history more clearly), to see
the utmost evil that is in women, while I have had but to believe
the utmost good. The best women are indeed necessarily the most
difficult to know; they are recognized chiefly in the happiness of
their husbands and the nobleness of their children; they are only to
be divined, not discerned, by the stranger; and, sometimes, seem
almost helpless except in their homes; yet without the help of one
of them, {4} to whom this book is dedicated, the day would probably
have come before now, when I should have written and thought no
more.

On the other hand, the fashion of the time renders whatever is
forward, coarse, or senseless, in feminine nature, too palpable to
all men:- the weak picturesqueness of my earlier writings brought me
acquainted with much of their emptiest enthusiasm; and the chances
of later life gave me opportunities of watching women in states of
degradation and vindictiveness which opened to me the gloomiest
secrets of Greek and Syrian tragedy. I have seen them betray their
household charities to lust, their pledged love to devotion; I have
seen mothers dutiful to their children, as Medea; and children
dutiful to their parents, as the daughter of Herodias: but my trust
is still unmoved in the preciousness of the natures that are so
fatal in their error, and I leave the words of the 'Lilies'
unchanged; believing, yet, that no man ever lived a right life who
had not been chastened by a woman's love, strengthened by her
courage, and guided by her discretion.