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Delivered from that tastelessness, which sooner or later creeps over a single life, every power and faculty is called into energetic exercise, and she feels the current of existence to flow in a richer, deeper stream. We are all made for action and enterprise. Existence, though surfeited with luxury and abundance, is insipid without it. The affections, which God has ordained to spring in the bosoms of those whom he has destined to pass through life together, are no deceivers. They are not intended to betray the sexes into a state of misery. The wife does not bid adieu to happiness, though she leaves a magnificent mansion to take up her abode under an humbler roof. Youth, health, employment, affection, hope, are more than a compensation for all. The privations of commencing life in narrow circumstances are borne with cheerfulness and alacrity. If there be on both sides good sense and generous feeling, as well as true affection, nothing will seem hard, and they will experience a happiness unknown to those who shut up or disappoint their affections from false pride, or from dread of losing caste, by beginning. life precisely as their fathers and mothers did before them.

The good wife! How much of this world's happiness and prosperity is contained in the compass of these two short words! Her influence is immense. The power of a wife, for good or for evil, is altogether irresistible. Home must be the seat of happiness, or it must be for ever unknown. A good wife is to a man wisdom, and courage, and strength, and hope, and endurance. A bad one is confusion, weakness, discomfiture, despair. No condition is hopeless when the wife possesses firmness, decision, energy, economy. There is no outward prosperity which can counteract indolence, folly, and extravagance at home. No spirit can long resist bad domestic influences. Man is strong, but his heart is not adamant. He delights in enterprise and action, but to sustain him he needs a tranquil mind, and a whole heart. He expends his whole moral force in the conflicts of the world. His feelings are daily lacerated to the utmost point of endurance by perpetual collision, irritation, and disappointment. To recover his equanimity and composure, home must be to him a place of repose, of peace, of cheerfulness, of comfort; and his soul renews its strength and again goes forth with fresh vigor to encounter the

labors and troubles of the world. But if at home he find no rest, and there is met by a bad temper, sullenness, or gloom; or is assailed by discontent, complaint and reproaches, the heart breaks, the spirits are crushed, hope vanishes, and the man sinks into total despair.

Let woman know then, that she ministers at the very fountain of life and happiness. It is her hand that lades out with overflowing cup its soul refreshing waters, or casts in the branch of bitterness which makes them poison and death. Her ardent spirit breathes the breath of life into all enterprise. Her patience and constancy are mainly instrumental in carrying forward to completion the best human designs. Her more delicate moral sensibility is the unseen power which is ever at work to purify and refine society. And the nearest glimpse of heaven that mortals ever get on earth is that domestic circle, which her hands have trained to intelligence, virtue, and love, which her gentle influence pervades, and of which her radiant presence is the centre and the sun.

It may be thought by some prosaic persons, that thus far in describing the sphere and duties of woman I have drawn too much from the

regions of sentiment and imagination. I can only say in my defence, that nothing is prosaic, which concerns human hearts and human happiness Woman is made to live in the regions of the sentiments and imagination. Her sorrows and her joys are there. It is they which to her clothe the dull affairs of this every day life with an interest unknown to the rougher sex. And she herself is the very poetry of the world.

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