LETTER XX.
HAPPINESS.
IT was a pleasant theory of an ancient musician, that the "soul was but a harmony." However erroneous the philosophy may be, it furnishes a profitable hint. The habit of eliciting from the discord of opposing circumstances, a song of praise, is of inestimable value. It was said of Klopstock, the German poet, that his "mind maintained a perpetual spring, a never-failing succession of beauty and of fragrance; if the rose wounded him, he gathered the lily, if the lily died on his bosom, he cherished the myrtle." Such affinity had this temperament with buoyancy of spirits, and a perpetual flow of the freshness of life, that even when the snows of fourscore years had settled upon his brow, he was designated by the epithet of the "youth forever."
This harmony of our nature with the tasks that are appointed it, is not only peculiarly graceful in woman, but in a measure necessary to the complete fulfillment of her destiny. In
