Feminine Influence on the Poets home. Christianity did little for women unless by an occasional resurgence of its democratic tendency. Asceticism and the

exaltation of virginity smeared marriage with some contempt. Woman was the "door of hell" and "mother of all human ills to the Fathers; and she was forbidden, says Lecky, to receive the Eucharist into her naked hands on account of her impurity. Nor does it appear certain that the worship of the Virgin Mother did much for women who could not become mothers without losing their virginity. The conditions of life were so harsh that an unearthly ideal may have been a necessary luxury, but undoubtedly the grass was not made to grow by contemplation of the stars. The living women of the Middle Ages could only gain power by separation from men in a monastic life, because in the contact of ordinary life they suffered by physical inferiority and lack of freedom.

It is not easy to exaggerate the misfortune of women under these conditions, because the evidence is practically all from men. Countless voices come to us out of the dark, but very few of the cries are from women. On the other hand it is likely that men, with the exclusive power of the pen, would underestimate or understate the powers of women. But great at all times those powers must have

been. Their legal and physical inferiority kept women down, but it kept them also together. They became a race apart. They were, in the words of Euripides, “a race well inclined to one another, and most safe in keeping secret matters of common interest." Women are still a race apart. They are foreigners, their world is another world, ever at hand, ever unavoidable, ever mysterious; and through this world is a man's nearest path to the strangeness of things. This is no small portion of their influence; and it must have been larger in Greece and Rome where men, no matter how superior, were yet born of women and trained by women. Pindar had his Corinna to instruct him in poetry, and Socrates his Diotima; and we may take these, with the feminine Muses and Sibyls, to be a parable. However inferior the woman, it was still sweet to be under one cloak with her, as the poet Asclepiades has said: "Sweet is snow in summer for one athirst to drink, and sweet for sailors after winter to see the crown of spring; but most sweet where one cloak hides two lovers, and the praise of Love is told by both." (Mackail's translation: "Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology.") Men in those days were rather more like us than sometimes appears through learned spectacles, if I may draw any conclusion

from the appropriateness to a modern occasion of another Greek poet's "first kiss":

At evening, at the hour when we say good-night, Moeris kissed me, I know not whether really or in a dream; for very clearly I now have the rest in mind, all she said to me, and all that she asked me of; but whether she has kissed me too, I am still to seek ; for if it is true, how, once thus rapt to heaven, do I go to and fro upon earth? (Mackail.)

The Greek also agrees with the Provençal in calling the dawn a hater of lovers for rising so swiftly upon their couch—

Ah God! Ah God, that day should come so soon!

It would not, therefore, be surprising if a Greek or Roman letter were some day to be discovered to match Byron's: "My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was," he says, "the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin, Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings."

Love poetry can only exist where women have some freedom of choice, and where men therefore run the risk of refusal. When marriages are arranged, as in antiquity and the Middle Ages, by the parents, love poems are addressed only to courtesans and to women who have married some one else. Accordingly, love poetry has advanced with

the position of women, and in no branch of literature is the gain upon the ancients so positively great as in this. Here the influence of individual women is again and again apparent. They give the impulse and the subject. When the subject changes the impulse will remain, and the influence, though not easily definable, is not the less great Buckle claimed for them an important part in the progress of knowledge, chiefly by encouraging in men deductive habits of thought.

Unconsciously," he says, "unconsciously, and from a very early period, there is established an intimate and endearing connection between the deductive mind of the mother and the inductive mind of her son. The understanding of the boy, softened and yet elevated by the understanding of his mother, is saved from that degeneracy towards which the mere understanding always inclines; it is saved from being too cold, too matter of fact, too prosaic." And not only is this relation to be found between mother and son, but between the feminine and masculine spirit at large. The turn of thought of women, "their habits of mind, their conversation, their influence, insensibly extending over the whole surface of society, and frequently penetrating its intimate structure, have, more than all other things put together, tended to raise us

into an ideal world, lift us from the dust in which we are too prone to grovel, and develop in us those germs of imagination which even the most sluggish and apathetic understandings in some degree possess." If the influence of the "more emotional, more enthusiastic, and more imaginative” sex has been great upon the progress of knowledge, it must have been very much greater upon poetry. Here was a more apt occasion for the exercise of that influence which M. Schuré attributes to Mathilde Wesendonck, Cosima Liszt, and Marguerite Albana, Wagner's friends. "The passion whose intoxication and travail they knew," says M. Schuré, "translated itself powerfully in the work of the man beloved. This is a kind of spiritual fecundation of the Eternal Masculine by the Eternal Feminine which is one of the highest functions of women.' Speaking of their intellectual influence, M. Maulde la Clavière has said:

You must not ask them to pry and delve into the stubborn heart of things; they look at the bright surface and penetrate what yields to the touch. And by this simple method they perceive things that escape the microscope, things that defy analysis, thanks to an intuitive impressionability which enables them to see rather than to know, and which would be wholly admirable if it were never misused. Further, they have a marvellous and mysterious