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Classic
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page iv
find a love of employment to be the source of unnumbered pleasures. To attend to
the nursing, and at least early instruction of children, and rear a healthy
progeny in the ways of piety and usefulness:-to preside over the family and
regulate the income allotted to its maintenance: to make home the sweet refuge
of a husband fatigued by intercourse with a jarring world: to be his enlightened
companion and the chosen friend of his heart: these, these, are woman's duties!
and delightful ones they are, if haply she be married to a man whose soul can
duly estimate her worth, and who will bring his share to the common stock of
felicity. Of such a woman, one may truly say, "Happy the man who can call her
his wife, Blessed are the children who call her mother."
When we thus observe her, exercising her activity and best abilities in
appropriate cares and increasing excellence, are we not ready to say, she is the
agent for good of that benevolent Being, who placed her on earth to fulfil such
sacred obligations, not to waste the talents committed to her charge.
When it is thus evident that the high intellectual attainments may find exercise
in the multifarious occupations of the daughter, the wife, the mother, and the
mistress of the house, can any one urge that the female mind is contracted by
domestic employ? It is however a great comfort that the duties of life are
within the reach of humbler abilities, and that she whose chief-aim is to fulfil
them, will rarely ever fail to acquit herself well. United with, and perhaps
crowning all the virtues of the female character, is that well-directed
ductility of mind, which occasionally bends its attention to the smaller objects
of life, knowing them to be often scarcely less essential than the greater.
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