Any well read, observing physician will tell you of the ruined healths of the majority of females educated at such exclusive seminaries.
And what is the reverse of this exclusiveness?
Bring the sexes up together. Teach them together, as much as is consistent. They will each have better manners, be more graceful, and possess clearer ideas of propriety, more beauty and better health, than by the plan of a separate education.
We all dread to grow old. Don’t talk of second childhood. Keep the first youthfulness fresh till the last. Love will do much towards continuing this desirable state. Says the Phrenological Journal, beauty comes and goes with health. The bad habits and false conditions which destroy the latter, render the former impossible. Youthfulness of form and features depends on youthfulness of feeling.
“Spring still makes spring in the mind,
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew the throbbing heart,
And we are never old.”
If, then, we would retain youthful looks, we must do nothing that will make us feel old.
O, the folly of parents in some things! The nonsense of sixty is the sweetest kind of sense to sixteen; and the father and mother who renew their own youths in that of their children may be said to experience a second blossoming of their lives. Teach them to talk to you of their friends and companions. Let the girls chat freely about gentlemen if they wish. It is far better to control the subject than to forbid it. Don’t make fun of your boy’s shamefaced first love, but help him to judge the article properly. You would hardly send him by himself to select a coat or a hat—has he not equal need of your counsel and assistance in selecting that much more uncertain piece of goods, a sweetheart?
There is a great deal of popular nonsense talked and written about the folly of our girls contracting early marriages. It is not the early marriage that is in fault, it is the premature choice of a husband. Only take time enough about selecting the proper person, and it is not of much consequence how soon the minister is called in. Keep him on trial a little while, girls; look at him from every possible point of view, domestic or foreign. Don’t be deluded by the hollow glitter of handsome features and prepossessing manners. A Greek nose or a graceful brow will not insure conjugal happiness by any means. A husband ought to be like a watertight roof, equally serviceable in sunny or rainy weather.
Action and Idleness.
While action is surely essential to our physical and moral being, all extremes should be avoided. Excessive labor, even out of door, in the air and sunshine, may be injurious. On this point I quote the Scientific American:—