opens to us is pleasant to the
eyes and good for the heart's food, and to be desired to make one wise.
A pure domestic love shines through it, tender, tranquil, and intense.
Its inmates are daintily, delicately, yet distinctly drawn. They are
courteous without being cold, playful without rudeness, serious, yet
sensible, reticent or demonstrative as the case may be, yet in all
things natural. It is not book, it is life. Each is a type of character
matchless in its way, but each is also a living soul, whose outward
elegance and grace are but the fit adjuncts of its inward purity and
peace. Even if such a home never existed, we should still defend its
portrayal, as the Vicar of Wakefield wrote his wife's epitaph during her
life that she might have a chance to become worthy of its praise.

It is a happiness also to make the acquaintance of women who are
brilliant and not bad, whose innocence does not run into insipidity, who
are no less queens than vassals, worthily the one, royally the other. We
meet in books many single-women, but they are usually embittered by
disappointment or by hope deferred,--angular, envious, busybodies in
other women's matters; or they are comically odd, self-ridiculing, and
unrestful; or, worst of all, they have become morally attenuated by a
thwarted love or a long course of dismal and absurd self-sacrifice and
are so resigned, colorless, and impassive, that, like Naaman, we are
tempted to go away in a rage. But where shall we find another
Clara,--beautiful, attractive, radiant, serenely living her happy life,
"aimless," but not "anxious," doing every day the duty that lies next
her hand, scarcely knowing that it is duty, never fancying that she is
out of her sphere or thinking whether she is in it, tranced in tranquil
reveries that spiritualize instead of spoiling her, and, shining ever
along her untroubled way,

"With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace"?

All the chief actors in the book are clever, rising often into the high
latitudes of genius, yet without that perverse _kink_ which is wont to
mar all satisfaction. There is no taint of poison in the air they
breathe. There is no passion hovering on the border-land of crime, or
defiling its garments with the dust of earthliness. Love is what it ever
should be, all noble and elevating,--worship as well as
devotion,--annihilating only selfishness, sanctifying, not sacrificing,
duty. There is no yielding to a depraved popular taste