HIGHER EDUCATION EOR WOMAN. 319 



ttan the fallacy of the popular idea, which conceives of the poet as an 

 unpractical dreamer, living apart from all the daily round of homely 

 duties : apostrophising the stars ; courting glimpses of the moon ; or 

 inditing sonnets to his mistress's eye-brows. The greatest poets have 

 been among the most practical of men, and none more so than 

 Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. In truth, while it is well to 

 find in the common round of daily life employment for those who 

 appear to have no capacity for higher things : no idea is more 

 opposed to the world's experience than that they best perform those 

 duties on which so much of the happiness of wise, men and women 

 depends. When Wordsworth dedicates one of his noble sonnets to 

 Milton, his climax shows his own estimate of such duties : — 

 " Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart ; 



Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea ; 



Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free : 



So didst thou travel on life's common way 



In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 



The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 



Perhaps it may seem to some of you that in an inaugural address for 

 a scheme of higher education, these " lowliest duties " might have 

 been left unnoticed, as wholly outside of all we have now in view. 

 Yet, therein lies the fancied impediment ; the lion in our path : all 

 the more difficult to combat because it is a mere creation of the fancy. 

 There is indeed a class of men to be found, who speak, with seeming 

 earnestness, as though some few additional improvements on the sewing 

 machine were all that is needed to make a perfect world without woman 

 at all. But such cynics may fitly be left to their own mechanical 

 resources. Nor is there much more need that I should combat preju- 

 dices of men of higher intelligence. It is your own prejudices that 

 have to be overcome. In the prologue to " The Princess," Lilia answers 

 to the pictured nobleness of woman in the Olden Time, when asked : 

 " Lives there such a woman now ?" 



" There are thousands now, 

 Such women, but convention beats them down; 

 It is but bringing up : no more than that ; 

 You men have done it. * * * 

 * * . * I would shame you all. 

 That love to keep us children." 



But Lilia is unjust. It is yourselves, not us, who do so : enlisting 

 your own prejudices on the side of inferior education. There is in the 



