Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[307] and fills some subsequent post of duty, as it may happen, before the public eye?

The answer is best to be found, perhaps, in the personal observation of each one. Spenser says of the three Graces of ancient mythology,

These three on men all gracious gifts bestow
Which deck the body or adorn the mind
To make them lovely or well-favored show,

and every one finds these Graces in his own circle of friends or kindred or early acquaintances, as the painter Palma Veccio drew them from his own daughters in his picture at Dresden. No one would be willing to acknowledge that the women he has known and loved the best are inferior to those of other lands or times, or that they need repression or seclusion to make them more satisfactory. Again, the charm of the savage or the repressed type is something that is apt to be temporary; the maiden child in the wild tribe becomes in later years the drudge, the crone, or the virago; the demure and subdued girl of French or Italian society may become the artful wife or the intriguing old woman. If we are to love the shy graces of character, they must be something that is ingrain and permanent, that adorns the young; yet deserts not the old; they must be essential graces of womanhood, not of childhood or girlhood alone. If we substitute a charm