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able to endure the rough roads, and sharp ascents of life. A nature, possessing great capacities for sympathy and tenderness, may doubtless be improved by the exercise of those capacities. Still the good gained, is only from the patient, or perhaps, the christian endurance of a disappointment. But where those capacities do not exist, and where religious principle is absent, the perpetual influence of a sickly and mournful wife, is as a blight upon those prospects which allure men to matrimony. Follies, and lapses into vice, may be sometimes traced to those sources which robe home in gloom.
If to a father, the influence of continued ill
