repressed impulses and energies more proper to our sex--more natural--perhaps more pleasing to God; but trusting in His mercy, and using the means He has given, we must do the best we can for ourselves and for our sisterhood. The cruel prejudices which would have shut us out from nobler consolation and occupations have ceased in great part, and will soon be remembered only as the rude, coarse barbarism of a by-gone age. Let us then have no more caricatures of methodistical, card-playing, and acrimonious old maids. Let us hear no more of scandal, parrots, cats, and lap-dogs--or worse!--these never-failing subjects of derision with the vulgar and the frivolous, but the source of a thousand compassionate and melancholy feelings in those who can reflect! In the name of humanity and womanhood, let us have no more of them! Coleridge, who has said and written the most beautiful, the most tender, the most reverential things of women--who understands better than any man, any poet, what I will call the metaphysics of love--Coleridge has asserted that the perfection of a woman's character is to be _characterless_. "Every man," said he, "would like to have an Ophelia or a Desdemona for his wife." No doubt; the sentiment is truly a masculine one: and what was _their_ fate? What would now be the fate of such unresisting and confiding angels? Is this the age of Arcadia? Do we live among Paladins and Sir Charles Grandisons, and are our weakness, and our innocence, and our ignorance, safe-guards--or snares? Do we indeed find our account in being "Fine by defect, and beautifully weak?" No; women need in these times _character_ beyond everything else; the qualities which will enable us to endure and to resist evil; the self-governed, the cultivated, active mind, to protect and to maintain ourselves. How many wretched women marry for a maintenance! How many wretched women sell themselves to dishonour for bread!--and there is small difference, if any, in the infamy and the misery! How many unmarried women live in heart-wearing dependence;--if poor, in solitary penury, loveless, joyless, unendeared;--if rich, in aimless, pitiful trifling! How many, strange to say, marry for the independence they dare not otherwise claim! But the more paths opened to us, the less fear that we should go astray.