as a Rosicrucian lamp, it burns unwearied, though condemned to the
solitude of tombs; and to its permanent life, as to every truth, each
age has in some form borne witness. For the truths, which visit the
minds of careless men only in fitful gleams, shine with radiant
clearness into those of the poet, the priest, and the artist.

Whatever may have been the domestic manners of the ancients, the idea
of Woman was nobly manifested in their mythologies and poems, whore
she appears as Site in the Ramayana, a form of tender purity; as the
Egyptian Isis, [Footnote: For an adequate description of the Isis, see
Appendix A.] of divine wisdom never yet surpassed. In Egypt, too, the
Sphynx, walking the earth with lion tread, looked out upon its marvels
in the calm, inscrutable beauty of a virgin's face, and the Greek
could only add wings to the great emblem. In Greece, Ceres and
Proserpine, significantly termed "the great goddesses," were seen
seated side by side. They needed not to rise for any worshipper or any
change; they were prepared for all things, as those initiated to their
mysteries knew. More obvious is the meaning of these three forms, the
Diana, Minerva, and Vesta. Unlike in the expression of their beauty,
but alike in this,--that each was self-sufficing. Other forms were
only accessories and illustrations, none the complement to one like
these. Another might, indeed, be the companion, and the Apollo and
Diana set off one another's beauty. Of the Vesta, it is to be
observed, that not only deep-eyed, deep-discerning Greece, but ruder
Rome, who represents the only form of good man (the always busy
warrior) that could be indifferent to Woman, confided the permanence
of its glory to a tutelary goddess, and her wisest legislator spoke of
meditation as a nymph.

Perhaps in Rome the neglect of Woman was a reaction on the manners of