occur in which we are surprised at the strength of character and energy of will displayed by this same class when the illusions of youth have lost their charms, and a false education has exhausted its frivolities.
A great injury has been done to woman, for which she is not alone responsible, in cramping her intellect just at the period it is most active, when the excitement of school-life passes away, and she needs something to satisfy the insatiate craving of that most wonderful mechanism, the human mind. The attention of many deep thinkers has been turned to this point, and hence volumes of homilies by both sexes upon the duties and employments of unmarried women. Why should they not be written for unmarried men as well? Because society allows them to mark out a sphere for themselves. A man will always find enough to occupy his mind after completing the established routine of education, without hurrying into a premature marriage as a woman often does, to escape this oppressive blank in her existence. Aspiration is immortal, and every act which tends to silence it dwarfs the divine nature, and embitters the human.
There are crises in life from which few are exempt, when our only safety lies in a great overwhelming impulse, that shall draw us aside from the trouble draining the heart's life-blood, into some active channel where self is forgotten in the measure of responsibilities, which, in our disposal of them, lift us into that eternal future where our influence shall mould the ages, but in which we, as individuals, are but
