A certain professional gentleman had the misfortune to possess a suspicious temper. He had not a better friend on the earth than Mr. C., yet by some unaccountable whim or other, he began of a sudden to suspect he was his enemy;—and what was at first at the farthest possible remove from the truth, ultimately grew to be a reality. Had it not have been for his jealousy, Mr. C. might have been to this hour one of the doctor's warmest and most confidential friends, instead of being removed—and in a great measure through his influence—from a useful field of labor.
'Let any man observe as I frequently have,' says the writer last quoted, 'with delight, the excessive fondness of the laboring people for their children. Let him observe with what care they dress them out on Sundays with means deducted from their own scanty meals. Let him observe the husband, who has toiled, like his horse, all the week, nursing the babe, while the wife is preparing dinner. Let him observe them both abstaining from a sufficiency, lest the children should feel the pinchings of hunger. Let him observe, in short, the whole of their demeanor, the real mutual affection evinced, not in words, but in unequivocal deeds.
'Let him observe these things, and having then cast a look at the lives of the great and wealthy, he will say, with me, that when a man is choosing his partner for life, the dread of poverty ought to be cast to the winds. A laborer's cottage in a cleanly condition; the husband or wife having a babe in arms, looking at two or three older ones, playing between the flower borders, going from the wicket to the door, is, according to my taste, the most interesting object that eyes ever beheld; and it is an object to be seen in no country on earth but England.'
It happens, however, that the writer had not seen all the countries upon earth, nor even all in the interior of United America. There are as moving instances of native simplicity and substantial happiness here as in any other country; and occasionally in even the higher classes. The wife of a distinguished lawyer and senator in Congress, never left the society of her own children, to go for once to see her friends abroad, in eleven years! I am not defending the conduct of the husband who would doom his wife to imprisonment in his own house, even amid a happy group of children, for eleven years; but the example shows, at least, that there are women fitted for domestic life in other countries besides England.
Ardent young men may fear that great sobriety in a young woman argues a want of that warmth which they naturally so much desire and approve. But observation and experience attest to the contrary. They tell us that levity is ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the companion of a want of ardent feeling. But the licentious never love. Their passion is chiefly animal. Even better women, if they possess light and frivolous minds, have seldom any ardent passion.
I would not, however, recommend that you should be too severe in judging, when the conduct does not go beyond mere levity, and is not bordering on loose conduct; for something certainly depends here on constitution and animal spirits, and something on the manners of the country.
If any person imagine that the sobriety I have been recommending would render young women moping or gloomy, he is much mistaken, for the contrary is the fact. I have uniformly found—and I began to observe it in my very childhood—that your jovial souls, men or women, except when over the bottle, are of all human beings the most dull and insipid. They can no more exist—they may vegetate—but they can no more live without some excitement, than a fish could live on the top of the Alleghany. If it be not the excitement of the bottle, it must be that of the tea or the coffee cup, or food converted into some unwholesome form or other by condiments; or if it be none of these, they must have some excitement of the intellect, for intemperance is not confined to the use of condiments and poisons for the body; there are condiments and poisons to mind and heart. In fact, they usually accompany each other.
Show me a person who cannot live on plain and simple food and the only drink the Creator ever made, and as a general rule you will show me a person to whom the plain and the solid and the useful in domestic, social, intellectual, and moral life are insipid if not disgusting. 'They are welcome to all that sort of labor,' said one of these creatures—not rationals—this very day, to me, in relation to plain domestic employments.—Show me a female, as many, alas! very many in fashionable life are now trained, and you show me a person who has none of the qualities that fit her to be a help meet for man in a life of simplicity. She could recite well at the high school, no doubt; but the moment she leaves school, she has nothing to do, and is taught to do nothing. I have seen girls, of this description, and they may be seen by others.
But what is such a female—one who can hardly help herself—good for, at home or abroad; married, or single? The moment she has not some feast, or party, or play, or novel, or—I know not what—something to keep up a fever, the moment I say that she has not something of this sort to anticipate or enjoy, that moment she is miserable. Wo to the young man who becomes wedded for life to a creature of this description. She may stay at home, for want of a better place, and she may add one to the national census every ten years, but a companion, or a mother, she cannot be.
I should dislike a moping melancholy creature as much as any man, though were I tied to such a thing, I could live with her; but I never could enjoy her society, nor but half of my own. He is but half a man who is thus wedded, and will exclaim, in a literal sense, 'When shall I be delivered from the body of this death?'