d of
submission!

And with this thought of modesty and gentleness to illuminate your dream
of an ideal wife, you chase the pleasant phantom to that shadowy
home--lying far off in the future--of which she is the glory and the
crown. I know it is the fashion nowadays with many to look for a woman's
excellencies and influence--away from her home; but I know too that a
vast many eager and hopeful hearts still cherish the belief that her
virtues will range highest and live longest within those sacred walls.

Where, indeed, can the modest and earnest virtue of a woman tell a
stronger story of its worth than upon the dawning habit of a child?
Where can her grace of character win a higher and a riper effect than
upon the action of her household? What mean those noisy declaimers who
talk of the feeble influence, and of the crushed faculties, of a woman?

What school of learning, or of moral endeavor, depends more on its
teacher, than the home upon the mother? What influence of all the
world's professors and teachers tells so strongly on the habit of a
man's mind as those gentle droppings from a mother's lips, which, day by
day and hour by hour, grow into the enlarging stature of his soul, and
live with it forever? They can hardly be mothers who aim at a broader
and noisier field; they have forgotten to be daughters; they must needs
have lost the hope of being wives!

Be this how it may, the heart of a man with whom affection is not a
name, and love a mere passion of the hour, yearns toward the quiet of a
home as toward the goal of his earthly joy and hope. And as you fasten
there your thought, an indulgent yet dreamy fancy paints the loved image
that is to adorn it and to make it sacred.

----She is there to bid you God speed! and an adieu that hangs like
music on your ear as you go out to the every-day labor of life. At
evening she is there to greet you, as you come back wearied with a
day's toil; and her look so full of gladness cheats you of your
fatigue; and she steals her arm around you with a soul of welcome that
beams like sunshine on her brow, and that fills your eye with tears of a
twin gratitude--to her and Heaven!

She is not unmindful of those old-fashioned virtues of cleanliness and
of order which give an air of quiet, and which secure content. Your
wants are all anticipated: the fire is burning brightly; the clean
hearth flashes under the joyous blaze; the old elbow-chair is in its
place. Your very unworthin