2. We should endeavor, as far as in us lies, to speak with grammatical correctness. The custom of having two sorts of language—one for composition and the other for conversation—appears to me to have a very ill tendency. I would have no one converse in a language he does not understand; but I would have every one converse correctly.
3. We should endeavor to select such topics as are not only profitable to one party—either ourselves or those with whom we are conversing—but such also as are likely to be acceptable. It is of little use to force a topic, however great, in our judgment, may be its importance.
4. Conversation should be direct—though not confined too long to one point or topic. But while one subject is up, you should know how to keep it up; or if the thoughts of either party wander, you should know how to return to it, without too much apparent effort.
5. Conversation, like every thing else under the sun, should have its time and place. It is as wrong to converse when we ought to read, or study, or labor, or play, as it is to read or play when we ought to converse. Social life has a great many vacancies, as it were, which good, and sprightly, and well chosen conversation should fill up.
6. Conversation should be sprightly. If we converse not in this way, we might almost as well dispense with conversation entirely. We might nearly as well resort to the dead for society;—to the dead, I mean, who speak to us through the medium of their works. Of course I refer to conversation in general.
7. We should remember our responsibilities. "For every idle word that men speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment"—said He who is to preside at the dread tribunal of which he spake: and an apostle has told us, that "our conversation should be in heaven;" that is, as I understand it, should be heavenly in its nature.
II. Reading.—There are, as I suppose, few young women of the present day, who do not read more or less; and to whom reading is not, in a greater or less degree, a source of intellectual improvement. Their reading is, however, governed chiefly by whim, or fancy, or accident—or at most, by taste. Some read newspapers only; some read only novels; some read every thing, and therefore nothing: Each of these methods—if methods they can be called—is wrong.
But shall not a young woman be governed by her taste? Is that to be turned wholly out of doors?
My reply is, that though our taste is not to be turned out of doors, wholly, it is, nevertheless, a very imperfect guide, and needs correction. Our intellect, like our moral and physical likes and dislikes, is, as I have elsewhere said, perverted by the fall. I will not say that our moral, intellectual and physical tastes are perverted in an equal degree; for I do not think so. Still there is a perversion, greater or less, of the whole man—in all his functions, faculties and affections. As a general rule, when left to our own course, we choose that food, for body, mind and soul, which, though it may be pleasant at first, is bitter afterwards. "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death."
Still it may be said—If our intellectual tastes are perverted, how are they to be set right? Why not, I ask, in the same way that our moral taste is—by the word and truth of God? "To the law and to the testimony."