I could say much on this point: allow me at least to say this: I verily
believe that any young lady who would employ some of her leisure time in
collecting wild flowers, carefully examining them, verifying them, and
arranging them; or who would in her summer trip to the sea-coast do the
same by the common objects of the shore, instead of wasting her holiday,
as one sees hundreds doing, in lounging on benches on the esplanade,
reading worthless novels, and criticizing dresses--that such a young
lady, I say, would not only open her own mind to a world of wonder,
beauty, and wisdom, which, if it did not make her a more reverent and
pious soul, she cannot be the woman which I take for granted she is; but
would save herself from the habit--I had almost said the necessity--of
gossip; because she would have things to think of and not merely persons;
facts instead of fancies; while she would acquire something of accuracy,
of patience, of methodical observation and judgment, which would stand
her in good stead in the events of daily life, and increase her power of
bridling her tongue and her imagination. "God is in heaven, and thou
upon earth; therefore let thy words be few;" is the lesson which those
are learning all day long who study the works of God with reverent
accuracy, lest by misrepresenting them they should be tempted to say that
God has done that which He has not; and in that wholesome discipline I
long that women as well as men should share.
And now I come to a thrift of the highest kind, as contrasted with a
waste the most deplorable and ruinous of all; thrift of those faculties
which connect us with the unseen and spiritual world; with humanity, with
Christ, with God; thrift of the immortal spirit. I am not going now to
give you a sermon on duty. You hear such, I doubt not, in church every
Sunday, far better than I can preach to you. I am going to speak rather
of thrift of the heart, thrift of the emotions. How they are wasted in
these days in reading what are called sensation novels, all know but too
well; how British literature--all that the best hearts and intellects
among our forefathers have bequeathed to us--is neglected for light
fiction, the reading of which is, as a lady well said, "the worst form of
intemperance--dram-drinking and opium-eating, intellectual and moral."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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