without quiver of balance; established and enthroned upon a
foundation of eternal law which nothing can alter, nor overthrow.

Believing that all literature and all education are only useful so
far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and THEREFORE
kingly, power--first, over ourselves, and, through ourselves, over
all around us,--I am now going to ask you to consider with me
farther, what special portion or kind of this royal authority,
arising out of noble education, may rightly be possessed by women;
and how far they also are called to a true queenly power,--not in
their households merely, but over all within their sphere. And in
what sense, if they rightly understood and exercised this royal or
gracious influence, the order and beauty induced by such benignant
power would justify us in speaking of the territories over which
each of them reigned, as "Queens' Gardens."

And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper question,
which--strange though this may seem--remains among many of us yet
quite undecided in spite of its infinite importance.

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women should be, until
we are agreed what their ordinary power should be. We cannot
consider how education may fit them for any widely extending duty,
until we are agreed what is their true constant duty. And there
never was a time when wilder words were spoken, or more vain
imagination permitted, respecting this question--quite vital to all
social happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly nature,
their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem never to
have been yet estimated with entire consent. We hear of the
"mission" and of the "rights" of Woman, as if these could ever be