predispose her to revery, meditation,
and morbid habits of mind and feeling. These shade her soul with gloom
which slowly but surely sinks the tone of her health and shatters her
constitution. Many a young woman plants the seeds of consumption in
some early sorrow, and many more sink the tone of their health to a low
degree by desponding reveries and half-despairing longings for something
they have but half conceived in their own minds, and put forth no
efforts to obtain. It is a burning shame to our nation and age that our
women are so impotent and sickly. We believe the best medicine for them
would be one that would set them all into a hearty laugh, taken once an
hour through the day. They need more sprightly activity, more
exhilaration of mind and body, more sunshine and bird-song, more
exuberant freshness of life and Happiness. Every gloomy thought is a tax
on health. Every desponding hour extracts a year's vitality from the
system. A melancholy spirit is like a humor in the blood, breeding a
perpetual disease. Doubts and fears are like chills and fevers, which
shake and shatter the vital economy to its center. No unhappy woman can
enjoy perfect health. The most vigorous constitutions will quail and
sink under the weight of a desponding mind. Health! what is all the
world without it? Who would sacrifice it for every earthly good? Then
let young women beware how they tamper with it by giving way to or
cherishing gloomy moods of mind. Seek to be peaceful, cheerful, happy,
if you would be well.

Their despondency of mind is equally destructive of spiritual health. It
unbalances all the mental powers, gives a morbid activity to some, and a
kind of reversed action to others. No gloomy spirit is beautiful or
harmonious. We may pity it, but we can not admire it--scarcely love it.
In God's sight its sadness is an imperfection--in many instances it is
sinfulness. The piety of such a mind is of a questionable character, and
its virtue is liable to be tinctured with selfishness or other evils.
Its judgment is improved. God loves a cheerful spirit, a happy soul. It
is not only a duty we owe to ourselves, but to God, to be happy. Our
efforts to subdue every desponding tendency in our minds should be as
great and as constant as to master our selfish passions or animal
desires. I fully believe we have the power to be happy if we will, or,
at least, the most of us have. Some unfortunate minds are
constitutionally down in the mouth