Page:Advice to young ladies on their duties and conduct in life - Arthur - 1849.djvu/70

62 leader; books of philosophy lift the mind up into an abstract region of thought; and poetry warms, inspires, and delights the imagination, while it purifies and refines the taste. All these are necessary to right intellectual culture; they form the very groundwork, solid walls, and inward garniture of a well-educated mind. But if reading be confined to these alone, there is danger of becoming cold and unsympathizing—of living in an intellectual world, more than in a real world of people, with like thoughts and like affections with ourselves. It is here that well-wrought fiction comes in with a humanizing tendency; giving to man a love for his fellow-man, and inspiring him with a wish to do good. In history, travels, and biography, we see man on the outside, as it were, and regard him at a distance, as a thinking and effective being; but in fiction, we perceive that he is fashioned in all things as we are; that he has like hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, and like aspirations after the good and the true, and we are gradually led to feel with and for him as a brother,—we hold him by the hand, we look in his face, we see the very pulsations of his heart. All this is good—all this is necessary to the true formation of character.

But for a young lady to limit her reading to