2.  Think of this other title, feminine.  This word, in its meaning, furnishes the second characteristic.  It pertains to woman, and denotes a soft, tender, and delicate nature.  Effeminate means destitute of manly qualities.

A woman truly feminine is thus described:  “No coarseness was mingled with her plainness of speech; no boisterousness with her zeal.  Her feelings, her sensibilities, her tastes were all characterized by a gentleness and delicacy seldom surpassed.  While her heroic daring and unconquerable energy excited admiration, her love of birds and flowers, and indeed of all that is beautiful in nature, made her seem almost childlike.”  This characteristic, so loved and admired, is woman’s glory, and yet it is effeminate.  Woman’s mind is quicker, more flexible, more elastic than man’s, though the brain, in weight, is much lighter.  Man’s brain weighs, on an average, three pounds and eight ounces.  Woman’s brain weighs, on an average, two pounds and four ounces.  The female intellect is impregnated with the qualities of her sensitive nature.  It acts rather through a channel of electricity than of reasoning.  Its perceptions of truth come, as it were, by intuition.  It is under the influence of the heart, that has deep and unfathomable wells of feeling; and truth is felt in every pulse, rather than reasoned out and demonstrated.  You cannot offend a woman so quick, in any way, as to ask her why she wishes to do thus, or why she reaches such a conclusion.  Her reply is, invariably, “’Cause!” And that is about all she knows about it; and yet woe be to the man who ignores her intuitions, or treats with disdain her advice.  Woman reads character quicker and better than man.  Her policy lies in her heart.  She feels rather than reasons.  Man reasons rather than feels.  Hence she is a helpmeet.  She fills a lack, and supplies a want.

In her the imagination and fancy have such a lively play, that the homeliest principles assume forms of beauty.  In intellectual pursuits she is destined to excel by her fine sensibilities, her nice observations, and exquisite tastes, while man is appointed to investigate the laws of abstruse sciences, and perform in literature and art the bolder flights of genius.  She may surpass him in representing life and manners, and in the composition of letters, memoirs, and moral tales, in descriptive poetry, and in certain styles of music and painting, and even in sculpture.  But she will never write an Iliad or a Paradise Lost, or tragedies like those of Aeschylus.  She will never rival Demosthenes in producing a political oration, nor a massive philosophic history like Thucydides.  She will not paint a Madonna like Raphael, nor chisel an Apollo Belvedere.  The logic of Aristotle, the polemics of Augustine, the prodigious onsets of a Luther, the Institutes of a Calvin, the Novum Organum of Bacon, the Principia of Newton, the Cosmos of Humboldt—­the like of these she will never achieve, nor is it desirable that she should.