will find each other at the right time, just as Spenser's knights,
though wandering in trackless forests, always encountered each other when
help was wanted.

And if all this is true of ordinary friendship--if it calls for so much
high principle and self-denial and prayer--what of love, "the perfection
of friendship"? It is usually either ignored or joked about. The jokes are
edged tools always in bad taste and often dangerous, but it is a pity the
subject should be ignored. When it becomes a personal question the girl is
sure to be too excited or irritable to take advice, so that there is
something to be said for that discussion of "love in the abstract," which
Sydney Smith overheard at a Scotch ball. It is surely better, in forming
her standard and opinion on this most important of all points, that a girl
should have the help of her mother and older friends. Girls do not go to
their mothers as they might, because they wait till they are sore and
conscious and resentful. Most girls would rather be married, and quite
right too,--in no other state of life will they find such thorough
discipline and chastening!--it is the only life which makes a true and
perfect woman. But if they wish it, let them not be so untidy, so fidgety,
so domineering, that no man in his senses would put up with them! And if
she be a "leisured girl" with no duty calling her from home (or very
possibly many duties calling her to remain at home), let her think, not
twice, but many times, before a wish for independence and Bohemianism
(which she translates into "Art") leads her into grooves of life where she
is very unlikely to meet the sort of man who can give her the home and the
surroundings to which she is accustomed. Harriet Byron's despair and
ecstasy about Sir Charles have passed away, but girls still dream of
heroes (not always so heroic as Sir Charles). Their dreams cannot fail to
be coloured by the novels they read and the poetry they dwell on; do they
always realize the responsibility of keeping good company? Read
love-stories, by all means, but let them be noble ones, such as show you,
Molly Gibson, Mary Colet, Romola, Di Vernon, Margaret Hale, Shirley, Anne
Elliot, The Angel in the House, The Gardener's Daughter, The Miller's
Daughter, Sweet Susan Winstanley, and Beatrice. It is impossible to dwell
on the mere passionate emotion of second-rate novels and sensuous poetry,
without wiping some possibility of nobleness out of your own life. Ev