friendship, without receiving a decent and friendly answer. With man it has often been otherwise. In wandering over the barren plains of inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden and frozen Lapland, rude and churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the wide-spread regions of the wandering Tartar, if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, the women have ever been friendly to me, and uniformly so. And to add to this virtue, these actions have been performed in so free and kind a manner, that if I was thirsty, I drank the sweetest draughts, and if hungry, ate the coarsest morsel with a double relish." God has given woman this lovely and loving nature. She lives and would live in the hearts of others. The

objects of her affection live in her thoughts; they live in her memory, live in her hopes and in her fears, in her toil and in her repose. She is more frank and has fewer imprisoned thoughts than man, because her affections govern her. She has more eagerness and intensity of character, because her affections are intense. When her affections are crossed, she may have a degree of bitterness that is not ordinarily possessed by men, because her affections are despotic, and her heart would fain play the tyrant. If her pride is more exacting, and her vanity more easily flattered; if her emotions are less impenetrable, and less under the control of skill and habit, it is because there are

strong affections within her which disdain concealment, and will not brook control. She may love cautiously; but where she loves, she loves ardently and long. She is the creature of affection. Even long before her heart is touched by definite attachments, there are within her bosom strong and deep affections, and the unignited materials of attachment that is warm and ardent. With those exceptions in which injury and wrong have driven her to desperation, she does not sink beneath this high-born excellence. You may bruise and crush her; but it is by bruising and crushing her unsoiled affections. Even then she is perhaps more lovely than ever; just as the sweetest herbs and flowers, when bruised, give forth their sweetest fragrance. This is her great peculiarity; in this lies her power. Ignorance, or mistake of this amiable trait of her character, has been the source of no small portion of the domestic evils and sorrows which have desolated the world. Not to know and not to value this great excellence of her nature is to misinterpret and defame her-is to know nothing of woman. Nor does that man de serve anything better than to be denied the thousand little attentions and delicacies which flow from the strength of her love whose mind is disciplined to mock its tenderness.

Woman is also more self-sacrificing than man. There are selfish women; but it is not so natural

for woman to be selfish; there are more kindly, and generous, and noble feelings in her bosom. She loves more than man, and therefore will give up more. There is nothing she will not sacrifice for those she loves. The life of woman is a life of self-denying sacrifice; the history of woman is the history of one who so identifies the interests of others with her own, that she seeks her own in advancing theirs. Ease, comfort, pride, wealth, pleasure, society, and long-cherished habits, all she was, and all she is, she renounces for those she loves. Could days of anxiety and sleepless nights, could deeds of self-renunciation and mortified pride testify, how accumulated would be the testimony to woman's self-sacrificing spirit! To feel thus, and to conduct thus, is her pleasure. She could not have the joy of a clear conscience, she would not be happy, she would not be woman, without giving up her own good for the good of others.

It is not less true that woman is more patient in suffering than man. The burden of suffering was laid upon her at her first apostasy; and God has prepared her to endure it quietly. Her spirit is more subdued than the spirit of man. Be the suffering bodily or mental, be it poverty, or reproach, or injury, she meets it; nobly indeed does she meet it. I have seen examples of heroic suffering in woman, that made me envy her lofty

bearing. Woman will suffer wrongfully, as man will not suffer. I know of but one exception to the truth of this remark: disappointment cuts deeper in woman than in man. It lingers longer; shut up as she is, and excluded from external excitement, it is brooded over and dwelt upon. She may not anticipate danger with the same unblanched countenance and unmoved nerve and muscle as man anticipates it; she may tremble in view of it, and shrink from it more instinctively. Where flight is possible, she will flee from it; and make almost frantic efforts to escape from it. She will dart from it like the swallow from the vulture's beak; but when it is inevitable, and comes crowding upon her, and when the blow falls, it is not woman's heart that is the first to complain.

Woman is likewise more sensible of her depend ence than man. God has made her dependent, and she feels it. Man is her natural guardian; it is not only her nature to feel her dependence upon him, but her strength and joy. Place her in danger, and she instinctively looks to man; and even if her husband is far away, her thoughts at once centre in him. She cries out for him, though she knows he is distant; nay, though sleeping in his grave, in sudden danger she may peradventure instantly call for her husband. Next to God, he is her confidence. Man summons his own firmness, and girds himself for the conflict, while woman

retires and retreats to her natural refuge. You see this spirit from her very girlhood. The girl flies to the boy for protection, the sister to her brother. She early imbibes this depending, confiding spirit, and it goes with her to old age, and to her last rest. She rejoices in it; it is her happiness to feel that she has some one to look up to, and cling to. There are exceptions to this great law of her sex, like Semiramis of Assyria, Catherine of Russia, and Elizabeth of England. When Xerxes invaded Greece, Artemisia, a distinguished female of Halicarnassus, displayed so much valor and skill at the battle of Salamis, as to call from the proud Persian the well-known remark, that "the men had acted like women, and the women like men." There are masculine and Amazonian women, as there are men who are effeminate. They are women who unsex themselves. This is not woman's amiable and affectionate nature; nor was it the character of the first woman. Nothing is more natural to woman than to feel this dependence; it is not mortifying to her, as it is to man; she is not ashamed of it, but rather is it her pride.

"God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more

Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise."

There is a peculiarity also in woman's love of power; it is not like the love of power in man. She is proud and ambitious; but it is not so much