only be gained by association with the female character, which possesses
the delicate instinct, ready judgment, acute perceptions, wonderful
intuition. The blending of the male and female characteristics produces
the grandest character in each."

The woman who has what Helen Hunt so aptly called "a genius for
affection,"--she, indeed, is queen of the home. "I have often had
occasion," said Washington Irving, "to remark the fortitude with which
woman sustains the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those
disasters which break down the spirit of a man, and prostrate him in the
dust, seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give
such intrepidity and elevation to their character that at times it
approaches sublimity."

If a wife cannot make her home bright and happy, so that it shall be the
cleanest, sweetest, cheerfulest place her husband can find refuge in,--a
retreat from the toils and troubles of the outer world,--then God help
the poor man, for he is virtually homeless. "Home-keeping hearts," said
Longfellow, "are happiest." What is a good wife, a good mother? Is she
not a gift out of heaven, sacred and delicate, with affections so great
that no measuring line short of that of the infinite God can tell their
bound; fashioned to refine and soothe and lift and irradiate home and
society and the world; of such value that no one can appreciate it,
unless his mother lived long enough to let him understand it, or unless,
in some great crisis of life, when all else failed him, he had a wife to
reënforce him with a faith in God that nothing could disturb?

Nothing can be more delightful than an anecdote of Joseph H. Choate, of
New York, our Minister at the Court of St. James. Upon being asked, at a
dinner-party, who he would prefer to be if he could not be himself, he