The mere discipline of the mind, the symmetrical development of man's higher powers, the æsthetic evolution of himself; all this, though it expand his intellect and enlarge his heart, though it impress on him more of the lineaments of the skies, and bring him nearer to his great Original, is but waste of time and thought, because it falls not within the described circle of the utilitarian. Shades of Bacon and Locke, of Shakspeare and Milton, of Goethe and Schiller, come and alight at least on the daughters of our land! Here is a wide field of influence for woman. You are the vestal virgins to watch the fires on the altar of the fine arts. Yours it is to check the sensuousness of man, to recall him from his ceaseless toil after the mammon of this life, his restless ambition to turn every thing to account in available funds, in bank-stocks, copper-stocks, railroad-stocks. Tell your sons and your sires that there are higher sources of joy. Point them away from earth's sordid gold to the brighter gems of literature. Direct their energies to the intellectual and moral advancement of their age. Help them to slake their quenchless thirst at the pure fountains of knowledge and religion. There is a poetry of life worth cultivating. There are spiritual entities around us to which we are linked by ethereal chains. Let us not struggle to throw off those chains, but rather to bind them faster about us. And when you see a link broken, and others likely to drop, mend it. Woman's office is it also _to soften political asperities in the other sex, and themselves to shun political publicity_. Not that woman need be ignorant of the great questions of the age; better be familiar with them. But let her not become absorbed in them: rather keep so aloof from exciting occasions as to be better qualified to form and express a deliberate and unbiased judgment on men and measures. Let her opinions be well matured, and always uttered with calmness and caution. When her dearest friends of the other sex seem embittered toward others, and in danger of forgetting the sweet charities of life amid the chafings of party rivalry, let her pour out the milk of human kindness into the cup of courtesy, and ask them to drink of it. When the waters are troubled and the billows roar, let her diffuse over them the oil of love to still the waters into a great calm. Surely this is an office higher, better far, than to be pressing on, as some would have her, into the busy bustle of out-door politics. Here is _influence_, and it is better than _power_. Who that loves woman, that really admires her worth as _woman_, that thinks of her as the delicate, refined, tasteful, sensitive development of humanity, the incarnation of all that is lovely, gentle, modest, peaceful, and pure, the highest earthly manifestation of God as _love;_ who that remembers her as the "help-meet," can bear the thought of hurrying her out upon the theatre of politics, the platform of legislation?