How to educate the feelings or affections, and bring the dispositions, aspirations, and passions into harmony with sound intelligence and morality . s the whole nature, fre-quently giving force and power and brilliancy to thedullest clods of earth. But under its scorching in-fluence, the homely, every-day duties of life are driedup and become tasteless and insipid. It is a tempera-ture in which the common virtues can not exist—theypale and die. Love, as a passion, therefore, is not in-tended to be a common state of mind, or ever to lastlong. Probably our first love ought ever to be ourlast, fo
How to educate the feelings or affections, and bring the dispositions, aspirations, and passions into harmony with sound intelligence and morality . s the whole nature, fre-quently giving force and power and brilliancy to thedullest clods of earth. But under its scorching in-fluence, the homely, every-day duties of life are driedup and become tasteless and insipid. It is a tempera-ture in which the common virtues can not exist—theypale and die. Love, as a passion, therefore, is not in-tended to be a common state of mind, or ever to lastlong. Probably our first love ought ever to be ourlast, for its commencement, in all well-regulated minds,being always controllable, it ought to be indulged onlywhen it can lead to matrimony, and the use of so in-tense a heat of feeling is then to fuse two individualsouls into one for life. Having answ^ered this purposeof making two people one for life, the feeling is nolonger an all-absorbing passion, but takes its placeamong the other feelings in due relative proportion tothem, first as love, and then as affection. Infinite mis^chief is done by that class of writers whose works tend ,_^!^ ,^-,C^. M. PLATE XII. The Social Affections. 89 to weaken the influence of the marriage tie, represent-ing it as less sacred and less binding by nature than itis by custom ; who make a plaything of love, andwhose heroes and heroines indulge a succession of littlepassions, not thinking the affection which remainswhen passion is dead good enough for such exaltedsouls, whether the object of that affection be husband,wife, betrothed, or what not. This getting up a pas-sion for one object after another, under the plea ofsympathy of soul and intellect, superiority to conven-tionality, etc., may be a circumstance of much interestand pleasurable excitement in the pages of a novel,and even interwoven with much beauty of thought andsentiment. But in real life such principles are false,dangerous, ruinous. If love has been allowed to ex-pa
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