WOMEN AS THEY ARE. GENTLE reader, pity our embarrassment, our palpitation of heart, our confusion of head. Here we have been sitting in vain, lighting up successive cigars, invoking all pleasant memories of the past, all glorious hopes and aspirations, all legends of good women, from Chaucer to the Muse's last, but not least beloved son, the noble Alfred Tennyson; but in vain— "The oracles are dumb." Yet within us there is a feeling, struggling to find vent, which we "Can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal." About fifteen-in some the attack com- mences earlier, in others later-most of us males are conscious that, besides ourselves, our respected parents, our amiable sisters, our tyrannical schoolmaster, there are other beings in the world, the most agreeable young creatures imaginable, with clear complexions, red lips, heavenly eyes, on whose marble foreheads float clustering curls, and from whose mouths flow silvery strains, by which the ear and heart are rapt alike in ecstacy divine. The probability is-nay, the certainty, that towards one of these you are drawn in a most mysterious manner. Some ripe damsel of twenty-one puts her arm in yours, one voluptuous summer evening, and in that moment an age has gone, old things have passed away,-the schoolmaster and his cane, tarts and nonsense,-verses, rabbits, pigeons, ponies, your terrier who is "a warmint for rats," all have faded from your memory. Poetry and passion, never more to die, if sensualism does not do its hellish work, have come to your heart, as a revelation from above; you feel manhood in the fire of your young heart, in your firmer tread, your thicker pulse. Then come stolen glances, lonely walks, invocations to that "Pale eyed maiden, With white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon. restless nights, fever and romance, and for a time overwhelming agony; when, after a month or two, you hear your lovely enamorata has married her Mr. Smith. This melancholy occurrence, however, does not break your heart, nor kill you, though you think it must, and have written, and sent to the "Little Peddlington Gazette" more than one poem intended to show such must be the inevitable result of the bitter blow your young spirit has sustained. You do survive it notwithstanding, and when twelve years after you meet Mrs. Smith, a demure matron, with half a dozen children of various size and sex, you wonder what thecould have seen in her to admire. -you ever Such is generally man's first realization of woman, as a presence and a power; thus generally does he first wake up to a passion, that all men have felt, all poets have sung; then first does desire seize the will, and guide with most imperious hand; then first, does life with its golden exhalations dawn on the enraptured eye, and earth is flooded. with "The purple light of love." But this is but a dream, bright, glorious, divine; but still a dream; a flash from heaven lighting up life's dark way, but gone almost in the moment of its birth, sic transit gloria mundi. You become conscious, that the world has but little room for such romance, as for a time held you captive— that ignorance is not merely the mother of devotion, but in some degree, of love,—that the gorgeous hues of fancy and passion are not exactly in strict accordance with truth,that her colouring is of a far more sober hue. In short, you turn to the perception of women, as they are, not women as the old Platonist paints them, the beautiful, leading man, by a love of the beautiful, to the love of the divine, turning his heart from each thought of sin and guilt, expel |