any disadvantages of
physical condition which prevent it from being easy and delightful, will
injure the system; and will prove a waste of mental power as well as of
physical health. The greatest lesson that we have to learn in our mental
life, is to value quality of work more and quantity less. Everybody
knows how much more exhilaration and less fatigue is experienced from a
brisk walk, than from standing listlessly around for double the length
of time; and it is just so with mental effort. We want neither feverish,
excited work, nor lazy work; but earnest, hard, vigorous effort, ceasing
when the brain is weary or the object is accomplished.[30]

I have yet to see the first proof in man or woman, that well-regulated
activity of the brain injures the health. I have known many instances
where vigor of body was restored by earnest mental life; and I believe
that more young women sink into invalidism, or die prematurely, from the
want of adequate thorough mental training, than from any other one
physical or mental cause.

For we must remember that the brain craves thought, as the stomach does
food; and where it is not properly supplied it will feed on garbage.
Where a Latin, geometry, or history lesson would be a healthy tonic, or
nourishing food, the trashy, exciting story, the gossiping book of
travels, the sentimental poem, or, still worse, the coarse humor or
thin-veiled vice of the low romance, fills up the hour--and is at best
but tea or slops, if not as dangerous as opium or whisky. Lord Bacon
says most truly: "Too much bending breaks the bow; too much unbending,
the mind." After labor, rest is sweet and healthful; but all rest is as
dangerous as all labor.

One great trouble in women's intellectual life is that it is too much
mere study, too little work with a purpose. It is all income without an
outlet, and that, we know, always produces congestion and disease.
Mental dyspepsia might be the diagnosis of many an irritable, unhappy
woman. She has eaten, but for want of exercise she cannot digest the
intellectual food she has received. An active pursuit, an earnest
purpose, is to the mind what out-door air and exercise are to the body.
But in our present social system, where it is still considered out of
place for a lady to work for her living, it is the hardest problem for a
mother to solve, how to supply this most important need of her daughter.
Mental and moral influences are as real active agents in hygienic l