kind we _can_ consider as perfectly pure, and put without caution,
restriction, or mutilation, into the hands of our daughters. I am,
however, of opinion, that as they will not always have their parents for
tasters, and as they will everywhere, even in the most select libraries,
meet with these mixed works, in which, though there is much to admire,
yet there is something to expunge, it is the safest way to accustom them
early to hear read the most unexceptionable parts of these books.

"Read them yourself to them without any air of mystery; tell them that
what you omit is not worth reading, and then the omissions will not
excite but stifle curiosity. The books to which I allude are those where
the principle is sound and the tendency blameless, and where the few
faults consist rather in coarseness than in corruption.

"But to return; she fancied that these inexperienced creatures, who had
never tried the world, and whose young imaginations had perhaps painted
it in all the brilliant colors with which erring fancy gilds the scenes
it has never beheld, and the pleasure it has never tried, could
renounce it as completely as herself, who had exhausted what it has to
give, and was weary of it. She thought they could live contentedly in
their closets, without considering that she had neglected to furnish
their minds with that knowledge which may make the closet a place of
enjoyment, by supplying the intervals of devotional with entertaining
reading.

"We carried Lucilla and Ph[oe]be to visit them; I believe she was a
little afraid of their gay countenances. I talked to her of the
necessity of literature to inform her daughters, and of pleasures to
enliven them. The term pleasure alarmed her still more than that of
literature. 'What pleasures were allowed to religious people? She would
make her daughters as happy as she dared without offending her Maker.' I
quoted the devout but liberal Hooker, who exhorts us not to regard the
Almighty as a captious sophist, but as a merciful Father.

"During this conversation we were sitting under the fine spreading oak
on my lawn, in front of that rich bank of flowers which you so much
admire. It was a lovely evening in the end of June, the setting sun was
all mild radiance, the sky all azure, the air all fragrance. The birds
were in full song. The children, sitting on the grass before us, were
weaving chaplets of wild flowers.

It looked like nature in the world's first spring.

"