And yet, although their habitations are fallen, they--such men and women as they--still live. Their hearts, hands, and heads are in all institutions of ours that are free. A great immortality, surely! If such men and women had been less severe, less honest, less gifted for conditions barren of luxuries, less elevated with an enthusiasm for justice, less clear in their vision of the eternal moralities, less simple and direct, less worthy inheritors of the great idea of liberty which inflamed generations of their ancestors, it is not possible that we should be here to-day doing our work to keep what they won and carry their winnings further. Their unswerving independence in thought and action and their conviction that the finger of God pointed their way--their theocratic faith, their lifted sense of God-leading--made possible the abiding of their spirit long after their material body lay spent. So it is that upon the level top of the Litchfield Hills--what with the decay of the material things of life and the divine permanence of the spiritual--there is a resting-place of the Blessed--an Island of the Blessed as the old Greeks used to say--an abode of heroes fallen after strong fighting and enjoying rest forever. UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY He is the half part of a blessed man Left to be finished by such a she; And she a fair divided excellence, Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. SHAKESPEARE If a man recognise in woman any quality which transcends the qualities demanded in a plaything or handmaid--if he recognise in her the existence of an intellectual life not essentially dissimilar to his own, he must, by plainest logic, admit that life to express itself in all its spontaneous forms of activity. GEORGE ELIOT Hard the task: your prison-chamber Widens not for lifted latch Till the giant thews and sinews Meet their Godlike overmatch. GEORGE MEREDITH UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY “I hate every woman!” cries Euripides, in keen iambics in a citation of the Florilegium of Stobæus. The sentiment was not new with Euripides--unfortunately. Before him there was bucolic Hesiod with his precepts on wife-choosing. There was Simonides of Amorgos, who in outcrying the degradation of the Ionian women told the degradation of the Ionian men. There was Hipponax, who fiercely sang “two days on which a woman gives a man most pleasure--the day he marries her and the day he buries her.” And along with Euripides was Aristophanes, the radiant laughter-lover, the titanic juggler with the heavens above and earth and men below--Aristophanes who flouted the women of Athens in his “Ecclesiazusæ,” and in the “Clouds” and his “Thesmophoriazusæ.” Thucydides before them had named but one woman in his whole great narrative, and had avoided the mention of women and their part in the history he relates. “Woman is a curse!” cried Susarion. The Jews had said it before, when they told the story of Eve--