If we were obliged to compare Mrs. Hawthorne with the caricatures of the strong-minded woman in which novelists so delight,--those "housekeepers by the wrath of God,"--like Mrs. Jellaby and similar monstrosities, then the answer would not be hard. We could all cry, Mrs. Hawthorne, now and forever! But when we compare her to the strong-minded women like George Eliot, perfect wives, perfect home-makers, perfectly sympathetic and loyal comrades of their husbands, and lacking nothing of womanly softness or tenderness with all their strength, then the answer is not so simple. But doubtless the fact that God created both types may be accepted as evidence that He saw uses for both, and that even the women whom He made "fools to match the men" are not without their purpose in the economy of the universe. Such thoughts as the following in regard to her husband, written by Mrs. Hawthorne after eight years of marriage, sound not unlike the rhapsodies of George Eliot concerning Mr. Lewes:-- "He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any more than it is for a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and a baby is not more unconscious of its innocence. I never knew such loftiness so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household matter any more than in the larger or more public ones. If the Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere their wings are very strong. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight years' intimate union. Such a person can never lose the prestige which commands and fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness, but in a kind of blissful confusion live on. If I can only be so great, so high, so noble, so sweet as he, in any phase of my being, I shall be glad. I am not deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and as all my friends will know in open vision." We will quote but this one passage from her letters about him, though the Life is filled with similar ones, and will give but one of his love-letters to her, and that not entire. He says:--