Now it really seems to me that nothing is more wanted among young women than a sound philosophy of life, one that they can live by and be happy in. Their duties and trials are to be great. Their influences are to strike into the hearts of the whole world. The generations to come are to be born of them. It is folly for them to expect to be happy by mere impulse. They must seek the Happiness of principle. They must make Happiness an object, and seek it with the use of all right means.
One consideration more is worthy of a moment's notice. It relates to health, both bodily and spiritual. One essential of health is cheerfulness of spirits. The weaknesses and diseases among females is most fearful. Only here and there is a healthy woman. And we attribute it in part to the great unrest and unspoken melancholy brooding in the great woman-soul of the world. Few, perhaps, fully realize the fearful truth of this remark. Many a beautiful woman is pining under a gloom she seldom expresses, and not more than half understands. Woman's confined life and nerve-distracting habits predispose her to revery, meditation, and morbid habits of mind and feeling. These shade her soul with gloom which slowly but surely sinks the tone of her health and shatters her constitution. Many a young woman plants the seeds of consumption in some early sorrow, and many more sink the tone of their health to a low degree by desponding reveries and half-despairing longings for something they have but half conceived in their own minds, and put forth no efforts to obtain. It is a burning shame to our nation and age that our women are so impotent and sickly. We believe the best medicine for them would be one that would set them all into a hearty laugh, taken once an hour through the day. They need more sprightly activity, more exhilaration of mind and body, more sunshine and bird-song, more exuberant freshness of life and Happiness. Every gloomy thought is a tax on health. Every desponding hour extracts a year's vitality from the system. A melancholy spirit is like a humor in the blood, breeding a perpetual disease. Doubts and fears are like chills and fevers, which shake and shatter the vital economy to its center. No unhappy woman can enjoy perfect health. The most vigorous constitutions will quail and sink under the weight of a desponding mind. Health! what is all the world without it? Who would sacrifice it for every earthly good? Then let young women beware how they tamper with it by giving way to or cherishing gloomy moods of mind. Seek to be peaceful, cheerful, happy, if you would be well.