Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/100

84 estimate of a wife's duties made her in all respects an admirable help-meet.

New duties and new trials both came to her, for an artistes life often abounds in cares and reverses; and Opie, though an admired and successful painter, was not without many anxieties, and had a- hard struggle for some years to keep the eminence he had attained.

It was at this time that Mrs. Opie^s pen was most active, and she wrote some stories that were greatly estimated for their moral excellence and literary beauty. She displayed a great knowledge of the human—the female—heart, its strength and its weakness; and the tenderness of her own nature made her excel in pathetic descriptions.

"Father and Daughter," and "Tales of the Heart," have retained their place among the purest works of fiction; while her story, "White Lies," had a great popularity, as useful to that large class of thoughtless young people who let their tongues run on,without caring to be accurate in what they say, doing often an immense amount of mischief by carelessly mixing up truth and falsehood, heedless of consequences. Would that all would ponder those capital lines of the Poet Laureate—

Nine years of happy wedded life ended in widowhood, and Mrs. Opie returned to her beloved father's