TRUE GENUINE SENTIMENT.
True genuine sentiment may be so connected with the virtue of action, as to bestow on it its brightest lustre, and its most captivating graces. And enthusiasm under these circumstances is so far from being disagreeable, that a portion is indispensibly necessary in an engaging woman; but it must be of the heart, not of the senses.—It must grow up with the feeling mind, and be cherished by a virtuous education, not compounded of irregular passions and artificially refined by books of unnatural fiction, and improbable adventure.
But this dangerous merit cannot be too rigidly watched, as it is very apt to lead those who possess it into inconveniencies from which less interesting characters are happily exempt.
Strong sensibility may carry a very amiable temper into the most alarming extremes.---The taste of those so actuated are passions. They love and hate with all their hearts, and scarcely suffer themselves to feel a reasonable preference, before it strengthens into a violent attachment.
When an innocent girl of this open, trusting, tender heart, happens to meet with one of her own sex and age, whose address and manners are engaging, she is instantly seized with an ardent desire to commence a friendship with her. She feels the most lively impatience at the restraint of company and the decorums of ceremony.—She longs to be alone with her—longs to assure her of the warmth of her tenderness, and generally ascribes to the fair stranger all the good qualities she feels in her own heart, or rather all those which she has met with in her reading, dispersed in a variety of heroines.—She is persuaded that her new friend unites them all in herself, because the carries in her prepossessing countenance the promise of them all.
If hints of her defects are given, she mistakes the voice of discretion. At first she listens to them with a generous impatience, and afterwards with a cold and silent disdain, and despises them as the effect of prejudice, misrepresentation, or ignorance.
Yet this trusting confidence, this honest indiscretion, is, at this early period of life, as amiable as it is natural; and will, if wisely cultivated, produce at its proper season, fruits infinitely more valuable than all the guarded circumspection of premature, and therefore artificial prudence. Nay, if the younger part of the sex are sometimes deceived in the choice of a friend, they enjoy even then an higher degree of satisfaction than if they never trusted—For to be always clad in the burthensome armour of suspicion is more painful and inconvenient, than to run the hazard of suffering, now and then, a transient injury.
These observations chiefly respect the inexperienced; for it is a certainty that women are capable of as faithful and as durable friendship as any of the other sex. They can enter not only into all the enthusiastic tenderness, but into all the solid fidelity of attachment.