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Woman-Friendships.
———"if she be a traitor,Why so am I; we still have slept together,Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together;And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,Still we went coupled and inseparable!"

When the implacable duke banishes Rosalind, Celia replies:

"Pronounce that sentence then on me, my liege,I cannot live out of her company!"

Shakspeare against the world! for who knew the world one half so well?

Not only are we impressed by the conviction that his glowing portraitures of woman-friendship are life-drawn; not only have we perfect faith in the possibility of a thoroughly unselfish, all-absorbing attachment between two women, but we entertain the belief that there are certain female minds so constituted that a tender friendship with one of the same sex is positively indispensible to happiness. Such natures experience an irresistible impulse to confide in one who, enlightened by her own yearnings and failings, can understand feminine wants and frailties; who can look upon feminine insufficiencies, not from a strong, manly, but a weak, womanly point of view.

A woman may be the most irreproachable of wives to the best of husbands, and yet feel a void in her affections, a chamber in her large heart unfilled; a something needful lacking, if there be no

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