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174 course which the love of distinction is apt to take, more productive of folly, and of disappointment, perhaps, than all the rest. It is the ambition of the female author who writes for fame. Could those young aspirants know how little real dignity there is. connected with the trade of authorship, their harps, would be exchanged for distaffs, their rose-tinted paper would be converted into ashes, and their Parnassus would dwindle to a molehill.

Still there is something which the young heart feels in being shut out from intellectual sympathies at home—something in burning and throbbing with unexpressed sensations, until their very weight and intensity become a burden not to be endured; something in the strong impulse of a social temperament, which longs to pour forth its testimony to the force of nature and of truth; something in those mysterious, but deep convictions, which belong to every child of earth, that somewhere on this peopled globe, beneath the glow of sunnier skies; or on the frozen plain, the desert, or the ocean; amidst the bowers- of beauty, or the halls of pride; within the hermit's cave, the woodman's cot, or wandering with the flocks upon the distant hills; there is—there must be, some human or spiritual intelligence, whose imaginations, powers, and feelings, operate in concert with our own. And thus we feel, and thus we write in youth, without any higher motive, because within our homes, tracing our daily walks, or mixing with the circle called society, we find no, chord of sympathy which answers to the natural music of our secret souls.

All this, however, is but juvenile romance. The same want of sympathy which so often inspires the first effort of female authorship, might often find a sweet and abundant interchange of kindness in many a faithful heart beside the homely hearth. And after all, there is more true poetry in the fire-side affections of early life, than in all, those