Make what you will of the slight, quivering blushes, and of the half broken expressions,—­more you cannot get.  The love that a delicate-minded girl will tell is a short-sighted and outside love; but the love that she cherishes without voice or token is a love that will mould her secret sympathies, and her deepest, fondest yearnings, either to a quiet world of joy, or to a world of placid sufferance.  The true voice of her love she will keep back long and late, fearful ever of her most prized jewel,—­fearful to strange sensitiveness; she will show kindness, but the opening of the real floodgates of the heart, and the utterance of those impassioned yearnings which belong to its nature, come far later.  And fearful, thrice fearful is the shock, if these flow out unmet!

That deep, thrilling voice, bearing all the perfume of the womanly soul in its flow, rarely finds utterance; and if uttered vainly,—­if called out by tempting devices, and by a trust that is abused,—­desolate indeed is the maiden heart, widowed of its chastest thought!  The soul shrinks affrighted within itself.  Like a tired bird lost at sea, fluttering around what seem friendly boughs, it stoops at length, and finding only cold, slippery spars, with no bloom and no foliage,—­its last hope gone,—­it sinks to a wild ocean grave!

Nelly—­and the thought brings a tear of sympathy to your eye—­must have such a heart; it speaks in every shadow of her action.  And this very delicacy seems to lend her a charm that would make her a wife to be loved and honored.

Ay, there is something in that maidenly modesty—­retiring from you as you advance, retreating timidly from all bold approaches, fearful and yet joyous—­which wins upon the iron hardness of a man’s nature like a rising flame.  To force of action and resolve he opposes force; to strong will he mates his own; pride lights pride; but to the gentleness of the true womanly character he yields with a gush of tenderness that nothing else can call out.  He will never be subjugated on his own ground of action and energy; but let him be lured to that border country over which the delicacy and fondness of a womanly nature presides, and his energy yields, his haughty determination faints, he is proud of submission!

And with this thought of modesty and gentleness to illuminate your dream of an ideal wife, you chase the pleasant phantom to that shadowy home—­lying far off in the future—­of which she is the glory and the crown.  I know it is the fashion nowadays with many to look for a woman’s excellencies and influence—­away from her home; but I know too that a vast many eager and hopeful hearts still cherish the belief that her virtues will range highest and live longest within those sacred walls.

Where, indeed, can the modest and earnest virtue of a woman tell a stronger story of its worth than upon the dawning habit of a child?  Where can her grace of character win a higher and a riper effect than upon the action of her household?  What mean those noisy declaimers who talk of the feeble influence, and of the crushed faculties, of a woman?