A sister’s love is pure, and therefore invaluable. No truth is more obvious than this, that those who have been favored with the sweet sympathies and affections of a sister, and educated in that unrestrained intercourse so favorable to the development of domestic virtue, possess a softness of character and purity of feeling, to which other men are strangers. I know it has been objected to this, that such a character is effeminate, and altogether unfitted for the sphere to which men are called. Now were the charge of effeminacy admitted, we have yet to learn that true fortitude is not equally the property of gentle as well as rugged natures, and that the manifestation of it in one person more than another, is not traceable altogether to other and opposite causes. But we do not admit it; the characteristic above referred to is not effeminate; it is too sacred not to be a treasure, and it is too beautiful to be an error. It is a spirit like His who stood upon the waves, passing over and stilling the angry waters of human passion; a breath of spring sent upon the world calling the moss and ivy to their high dwellings, and scattering the flowers upon the slopes and in the vallies; a beam of sunshine thrown down from a summer sky, casting into shade the roughness of the landscape, and softening all into beauty. A character matured under the circumstances referred to, need lose nothing of its firmness by the process. On the contrary, the native energies of the mind may expand with greater freedom (for many of those things which usually retard it are removed) and it can ruffle its wings with a wider sweep, and stoop for the quarry with a nobler vision. As for the charge, that our capacities for misery are increased in an increased ratio by that refinement of feeling which is induced by feminine intercourse, we hardly think it worth the refutation. The fact that that French fool, Rousseau, could start a question which involves this, has not succeeded in raising it above contempt; and we shall quit the subject therefore with the simple statement of our own belief, viz.--that Heaven never endowed man with any superfluous faculties, that at every successive stage of moral and mental culture there is more than a proportionate increase of positive happiness, and that it is only when every power of the mind is in requisition and each taxed to its extreme capacity, that the mind approaches its perfection.