s induced to
slacken your exertions in the task of self-improvement. You will not be
easily persuaded that it is not your duty to educate yourself; the doubt
that will be more easily instilled into your mind will be respecting the
possible injury to your happiness or worldly advancement by the increase
of your knowledge and the improvement of your mind. Look, then, again
around you, and see whether the want of employment confers happiness,
carefully distinguishing, however, between that happiness which results
from natural constitution and that which results from acquired habits.
It is true that many of the careless, thoughtless girls you are
acquainted with enjoy more happiness, such as they are capable of, in
mornings and evenings spent at their worsted-work, than the most
diligent cultivation of the intellect can ever insure to you. But the
question is, not whether the butterfly can contentedly dispense with the
higher instincts of the industrious, laborious, and useful bee, but
whether the superior creature could content itself with the insipid and
objectless pursuits of the lower one. The mind requires more to fill it
in proportion to the largeness of its grasp: hope not, therefore, that
you could find either their peace or their satisfaction in the
purse-netting, embroidering lives of your thoughtless companions. Even
to them, be sure, hours of deep weariness must come: no human being,
whatever her degree on the scale of mind, is capable of being entirely
satisfied with a life without object and without improvement. Remember,
however, that it is not at all by the comparative contentedness of their
mere animal existence that you can test the qualifications of a habit of
life to constitute your own happiness; that must stand on a far
different basis.

In the case of a very early marriage, there may be indeed no opportunity
for the weariness of which I have above spoken. The uneducated and
uncultivated girl who is removed from the school-room to undertake the
management of a household may not fall an early victim to _ennui_; that
fate is reserved for her later days. Household details (which are either
degrading or elevating according as they are attended to as the
favourite occupations of life, or, on the other hand, skilfully managed
as one of its inevitable and important duties) often fill the mind even
more effectually to the exclusion of better things than worsted-work or
purse-netting would have done. The young