o school with hope; but, ere
you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that
dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that
hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and
yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself
are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfections,
and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and
that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you
will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a
lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you
will constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the
failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain
the sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people continually
spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love
upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come
glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.

*****

But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the
knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences
between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but
principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the
girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very
small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for
judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are
taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place
their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What should
be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two
flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we
know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a
raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into
that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's journey with
ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make
shipwreck, but that any come to port.

*****

Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim
loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, who can
nu