Pythagoras said that only good things were to be predicted of women, since they were the mothers of ornaments, of conversation and of confidence, and that he who invented names, perceiving that women were adapted to piety and friendship, gave to each of their ages the name of some Deity--to a maiden, Core, or Proserpine, to a bride Nymphe, to a mother, Mater, to a grandmother, according to the Dorian dialect, Maia. And in accordance with the like persuasion the oracles were always unfolded into light by women. Tacitus tells us that the Northern nations also held women in high esteem, "believing ladies had something divine about them." And this faith has descended to men of the Saxon name, the best regarding her as endowed with magical properties, the type of the highest culture the advanced nations have attained. Endowed with magnetic gifts; by necessity of sex, a realist and diviner, she lives nearest the cardinal facts of existence, instinct with the mysteries of love and fate; a romance ever attaching itself to her name and destiny. Entering the school of sensibility with life, she seizes personal qualities by a subtlety of logic overleaping all deductions of the slower reason; her divinations touching the quick of things as if herself were personally part of the chemistry of life itself. We cannot conceive her as distinct, distant, unrelated, she seems so personal, concrete, so near; yet can never come quite up to her discernments, nor gainsay their delicacy and truthfulness. Then constancy, fidelity, fortitude, kindness, gratitude, grace, courtesy, discretion, taste, conversation, the adornments of life, were bare names without the splendor of illustration of which the history of the sex affords so many brilliant examples. It seems as if in moulding his world the Creator reserved his choicest work till the last, and consummated his art in her endowments. Shall our sex confess to some slight in not having been mingled more freely of her essence, that so we too might have had access to the crypts into which she is privileged by birthright to enter? Hers is the way of persuasion, of service, forbearance: "If thou dost anything confer that's sweet, In me a grateful relish it shall meet, But if thy bounties thou dost take away, The least repining word I will not say."