Page:Woman in the Nineteenth Century 1845.djvu/137

Rh life. Like Lady Russell, she never, by word or look, discouraged me from running all hazards for the salvation of my country's liberties; she was willing to share with me, and that her children should share with us both, in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard.”

Will a woman who loves flattery or an aimless excitement, who wastes the flower of her mind on transitory sentiments, ever be loved with a love like that, when fifty years trial have entitled to the privileges of “the golden marriage?” Such was the love of the iron-handed warrior for her, not his hand-maid, but his help-meet:

“Whom God loves, to him gives he such a wife.” I find the whole of what I want in this relation, in the two epithets by which Milton makes Adam address his wife.

In the intercourse of every day he begins:

In a moment of stronger feeling,

What majesty in the cadence of the line; what dignity, what reverence in the attitude, both of giver and receiver!

The woman who permits, in her life, the alloy of vanity; the woman who lives upon flattery, coarse or fine, shall never be thus addressed. She is not immortal as far as her will is concerned, and every woman who does so creates miasma, whose spread is