to a just sense of the deep responsibility which rests upon us,
for the faithful improvement of this talent, and our consequent
accountability for its neglect or perversion!

It were not a little amusing, if it were not so melancholy, to listen to
the reasoning employed by many ladies, in evading any charges of
non-improvement of this trust. She who perhaps but a moment before may
have listened with the utmost self-complacency to the flattering strains
of the poet, who had invested her sex with every charm calculated to
render them ministering angels to ruder and sterner man, no sooner finds
herself addressed as the possessor of a talent, implying
responsibility, and imposing self-exertion and self-denial in its
exercise, than she instantly disclaims, with capricious diffidence, all
pretensions to influence over others. But we cannot avert accountability
by disclaiming its existence; neither will the disavowal of the
possession of a talent alter the constitution of our nature, which God
has so formed and so fitted to produce impressions in, and receive them
from, kindred minds, that it is impossible for us to _exist_ without
exerting a continual and daily influence over others; either of a
pernicious or salutary character.

"Woman," to use the words of an accomplished living writer, "has been
sent on a higher mission than man; it may be a more arduous, a more
difficult one. It is to manifest and bring to a full development certain
attributes which belong, it is true, to our common nature, but which,
owing to man's peculiar relation to the external world, he could not so
well bring to perfection. Man is sent forth to subdue the earth, to
obtain command over the elements, to form political communities; and to
him, therefore, belong the more hardy and austere virtues; and as they
are made subservient to the relief of our physical wants, and as their
results are more obvious to the senses, it is not surprising that they
have acquired in his eyes an importance which does not in strictness
belong to them. But humility, meekness, gentleness, love, are also
important attributes of our nature, and it would present a sad and
melancholy aspect without them. But let us ask, will man, with his
present characteristic propensities, thrown much more than woman, by his
immediate duties, upon material things; obliged to be conversant with
objects of sense, and exposed to the rude conflicts which this leads to;
will he bring out these vi