Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/28

Rh Youth is the season for regulating these emotions as we ought, because it is comparatively easy to govern our affections when first awakened; after they have been allowed for some time to flow in any particular channel, it requires a painful and determined effort to restrain or divert their course; nor does the constitution of the human mind endure this revulsion of feeling unharmed. As the country over whose surface an impetuous river has poured its waters, retains, after those waters are gone, the sterile track they once pursued, marring the picture as with a scar—a seamy track of barrenness and drought; so the course of misplaced affection leaves its indelible trace upon the character, breaking the harmony of what might otherwise have been most attractive in its beauty and repose.

There is, perhaps, no subject on which young women are apt to make so many and such fatal mistakes as in the regulation of their emotions of attraction and repulsion; and chiefly for this reason—because there is a popular notion prevailing amongst them, that it is exceedingly becoming to act from the impulse of the moment, to be, what they call, "the creatures of feeling," or, in other words, to exclude the high attribute of reason from those very emotions which are given them, especially, to serve the most exalted purposes. "It is a cold philosophy," they say, "to calculate before you feel;" and thus they choose to act from impulse rather than from principle.

The unnatural mother does this when she singles out a favourite child as the recipient of all her endearments, leaving the neglected one to pine away its little life. The foolish mother does this, when she withholds, from imagined tenderness, the wholesome discipline which infancy requires—choosing for her unconscious offspring a succession of momentary indulgences which are sure to entail upon them years of suffering in after life. The fickle friend does