It appears to me—and I speak it with reverence—that the Miltonic type is not the highest conceivable, nor the best fitted for sculptural treatment. Milton has evidently lavished all his power on this fairest of created beings; but he makes her too nymph-like—too goddess-like. In one place he compares her to a Wood-nymph, Oread, or Dryad of the groves; in another to Diana’s self, “though not, as she, with bow and quiver armed.” The scriptural conception of our first parent is not like this; it is ampler, grander, nobler far. I fancy her the sublime ideal of maternity. It may be said that this idea of her predestined motherhood should not predominate in the conception of Eve before the Fall: but I think it should. It is most beautifully imagined by Milton that Eve, separated from her mate, her Adam, is weak, and given over to the merely womanish nature, for only when linked together and supplying the complement to each other’s _moral_ being, can man or woman be strong; but we must also remember that the “spirited sly snake,” in tempting Eve, even when he finds her alone, uses no vulgar allurements. “Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” Milton, indeed, seasons his harangue with flattery: but for this he has no warrant in Scripture. As the Eve of Paradise should be majestically sinless, so after the Fall she should not cower and wail like a disappointed girl. Her infinite fault, her infinite woe, her infinite penitence, should have a touch of grandeur. She has paid the inevitable price for that mighty knowledge of good and evil she so coveted; that terrible predestined experience—she has found it, or it has found her;—and she wears her crown of grief as erst her crown of innocence. I think the noble picture of Eve in Mrs. Browning’s Drama of Exile, as that of the Mother of our redemption not less than the Mother of suffering humanity, might be read and considered with advantage by a modern sculptor. “Rise, woman, rise To thy peculiar and best altitudes Of doing good and of resisting ill! Something thou hast to bear through womanhood; Peculiar suffering answering to the sin, Some pang paid down for each new human life; Some weariness in guarding such a life, Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust From those thou hast too well served; from those beloved Too loyally, some treason. But go, thy love Shall chant to itself its own beatitudes After its own life-working! I bless thee to the desert and the thorns, To the elemental change and turbulence, And to the solemn dignities of grief; To each one of these ends, and to this end Of Death and the hereafter! _Eve._ I accept, For me and for my daughters, this high part Which lowly shall be counted!”