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The hum of business, the excitement of action, are calculated to heighten the pleasures of existence, but there must be firmness of nerve to make activity enjoyment. When the strength is sunk far below its natural level, the busy whirl of life passes over to a source of pain and annoyance. There is something soothing and tranquillizing in the approach of evening, but a slight depression of the animal spirits, transforms tranquillity to sadness.

All the impulses of nature are intended by God, as they strike upon the senses, to elicit the most delicious music. But then the harp must be in tune. If its chords are unstrung by ill health, the same external impulses grate harsh discord.

To the sickly child then, what a different prospect does life present! It wants the first and most indispensable condition of happiness. In it the idea of duty may be early developed, and those moral pleasures which spring from the discharge of duty, will be accessible; and some of the brightest ornaments of human nature have been persons debarred by ill health from almost all physical enjoyment. And some of the most successful in the va

rious walks of business and literature have been men who have labored and thought and studied merely to divert their consciousness from their own sufferings, and who would gladly have laid down, at any hour, the burden of life.

But is there any mother who can bear the thought of her own offspring entering upon such a life, and accomplishing such a destiny. of martyrdom? If her maternal tenderness revolts at the thought, let her beware how she trifles with her own health, or by neglect or imprudence, produces in herself a feebleness which may be hereditary.

The saddest picture of all, and one which ought to be held up to the mental eye of every young woman, till she trains herself to a discreet and scrupulous care of her health, is a young mother passing away to the tomb before middle life, leaving her children to the tenderness or the neglect of she knows not whom. A house left desolate by the death of a young mother, is one of the most melancholy places which is ever visited by a thoughtful mind. It is as if a star had fallen from its sphere, and gone out in utter dark

ness.

To whom could life itself be more valuable, interesting or happy for its own sake? In the very relation of wife, entered upon at that period when the susceptibilities of enjoyment were greatest, and the world had not lost the freshness of its early promise, there is enough to make existence most precious. The well remembered days of youth have not yet receded so far into the distance, as to have lost their power to soothe and refresh the mind. The present is filled with duty and enterprise and action. To her life is not a bare thread, connecting day with day and hour with hour in tasteless monotony. It is strung thick with the pearls of domestic, quiet duties, and here and there with the precious diamond of a noble deed. Who, like the mother, can fill the future with bright and budding hopes? Every child which plays at her side, or reposes on her bosom, is an heir of God's world, has an inheritance among the bounties of his providence, a sphere of honor and happiness to fill.

And has not the young mother reasons above all others for desiring life? Shall she not wish to see, as well as anticipate the development and maturity of her children?

Yet how many there are before whose declining strength, all those bright visions fade away, who are destined to feel first the alarming possibility, then the fatal certainty, that in a few months or years, they must abandon the most interesting and responsible position that a human being can occupy! The tender tie of mother and children must be severed when it is strongest, and most especially the source of interest and satisfaction. Her guardianship is to be withdrawn at the very moment when they need it the most. A mother's instinctive affection is the only sure pledge of fidelity in the training of the young. Nothing else can prompt the exertion, nothing else can secure the patience, nothing else can keep alive that perpetual watchfulness which is indispensable to the welfare and safety of the thoughtless, the inexperienced, the tempted.

But the mother and the children are not the only ones that suffer. There is another, to whom this bereavement may be worse than death, the husband and the father. His whole happiness has been risked upon a single stake, and is suspended upon the frail life of one human being. All his plans, all his

prospects, all his hopes have centred in her. Her presence has been the invisible charm which has shed light and beauty on all things. For her sake labor has been light, and enterprise joyful. Her sympathy has soothed him in every trial, and her hearty and disinterested counsels have often, like a kind of inspiration, guided him in his dark and doubtful way. Life itself has been more than doubled in interest through sympathy with keener perceptions and livelier sensibilities. When she is gone, half of him is dead, and he lives on only a broken and mutilated existence. The best, most beautiful and precious part of every thing has perished with her. He may form new connexions, but the chances of happiness are almost infinitely diminished. It requires a degree of wisdom, forbearance and principle, not often to be found, to make the place of step-mother any thing but the source of misery, discord and estrangement.

From all these considerations it follows, that there is scarce any place on earth so full of anxious forebodings, as the sick room of a young mother.

I have drawn these various pictures in dark colors, not darker however than the reality,

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