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Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
page 60 of 155 (38%)

You may think perhaps a Greek knight would have had a lower estimate
of women than this Christian lover. His spiritual subjection to
them was indeed not so absolute; but as regards their own personal
character, it was only because you could not have followed me so
easily, that I did not take the Greek women instead of
Shakespeare's; and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty
and faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; the
divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness and
simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of that
of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient,
fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister, and daughter, in
Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent; and
finally, the expectation of the resurrection, made clear to the soul
of the Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to
save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness of death.

Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you if I
had time. I would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a Legend
of Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and
show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and
sometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the
spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could go back into the
mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the
great people,--by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the
Lawgiver of all the earth should be educated, rather than by his own
kindred;--how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations,
gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a Woman; and into her
hand, for a symbol, the weaver's shuttle; and how the name and the
form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks,
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