onsibilities, out of view? Who would
believe that this love, so denounced, so guarded against, so carefully
banished from the minds of young women, is the one principle on which
their future happiness may be founded or wrecked? It is sure to seek
them, (most of them, at least,) like death in the fable, to find them
unprepared,--too often to leave them wretched.

Meanwhile, these exaggerated precautions in the education of one sex
have been met by equally fatal negligence in the education of the other;
and while to girls have been denied the very thoughts of love,--even in
its noblest and purest form,--the most effeminate and corrupt
productions of the heathen writers have been unhesitatingly laid open to
boys; so that the two sexes, on whose respective notions of the passion
depends the ennobling or the degrading of their race, meet on these
terms:--the men know nothing of love but what they have imbibed from an
impure and polluted source; the women, nothing at all, or nothing but
what they have clandestinely gathered from sources almost equally
corrupt. The deterioration of any feeling must follow from such
injudicious training, more especially a feeling so susceptible as love
of assuming such differing aspects.

Let no sober-minded person be startled at the deductions hence drawn,
that it is foolish to banish all thoughts of love from the minds of the
young. Since it is certain that girls will think, though they may not
read or speak, of love; and that no early care can preserve them from
being exposed, at a later period, to its temptations, might it not be
well to use here the directing, not the repressing power? Since women
will love, might it not be as well to teach them to love wisely? Where
is the wisdom of letting the combatant go unarmed into the field, in
order to spare him the prospect of a combat? Are not women made to love,
and to be loved: and does not their future destiny too often depend upon
this passion? And yet the conventual prejudice which banishes its name
subsists still.

"Mothers forget, in presence of their children, all the dangers with
which this prejudice has surrounded themselves; the illusions which
arise from that ignorance, and the weakness which springs from those
illusions. To open the minds of the young to the nature of true love, is
to arm them against the frivolous passions which usurp its name, for in
exalting the faculties of the soul, we annihilate, in a great degree,
the delus