Page:A New System of Domestic Cookery (1824 edition).pdf/38

xxviii find a life 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, there are woman's duties! and delightful 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.