Woman has always been a puzzle, an enigma, to man. When, in the pride of his anatomical skill, he has essayed to make her his study, thinking to master the secret of her curious physical being, he has been forced to stop short of his purpose, dumb and blind in the presence of that wondrous complexity that no science of his own can master; and no casuist has yet solved the _why_ of her equally wonderful and complex mental and spiritual being. They have made Reason, cold, critical, judge, the test; but the fine, delicate essence of her real being has always eluded it. When Love seeks the solution--the large, generous Love, that is one day to sit as the judge of all things, supreme over purblind human Reason--then _she_ will be understood, for she will yield to the asking of that all-seeing One. This will be when the world is ripe for the advent of woman, who shall rule through love, the highest rule of all. Slowly, slowly, though surely, is the world ascending, through the wondrous secret chain of _influences_ binding her to the moral order of the universe, to the height of this supernal law of love; and there, in that new and holy kingdom, woman's crown and sceptre await her. But who shall say that a glimmer of this future royal beauty and glory has yet dawned upon her? If man has misunderstood woman, she has none the less misunderstood herself. Indeed, her feet have for ages been treading debatable ground, that has shaken beneath her through the clashings of man's ignorance and her own vague, restless clamors and aimlessness. She has felt the stirrings within of that real being she was created, but has never dared to assert herself, or, to speak more truly, has only known to assert herself in the wrong direction. False voices there have been without number, but not even yet has true womanhood been able, in spite of its irrepressible longings, to utter that clear, free, elevated speech that shall yet stir the keenest pulses of the world.