TRUE LOVE.

What kind of love is likely to be lasting and productive in happiness?” This important and often-asked question has been answered by wiser heads than mine, but these are my sentiments: - True love may be founded on passion, but must be upheld by principle. Though it begins in the admiration of youth for beauty, it must be continued in the attachment we feel to purity of mind, goodness of heart, and excellence of understanding. Its first ardour, arising from effervescence of feeling, may in a short time subside; but its intellectual part gradually strengthens, and a sense of duty insures a continuance of those delicate attentions which were first prompted by youthful gallantry. It is this that marks the difference between genuine affection and the fleeting passion of a hot head and a cold heart, which as soon as its early vehemence is past degenerates into indifference or unkindness. The subject of the latter allows his deportment towards his wife to be governed by whatever feeling happens to be uppermost, and it his temper is ruffled by remote causes, she feels its effects; but he who possesses the former is careful to preserve in his mind a feeling stronger than common vexation – a feeling made up of a proud sense of what is owing from the noblest and the greatest of God’s creatures, Man, and a kind regard of everything due to the most lovely and dependent of them, Woman. Where sufficient care is take to cultivate this principle, it is not impossible for it to exist in conjunction with warmth, or even violence, of temper. A man may be hasty, but if he be generous withal, his infirmity of disposition will seldom or never show itself to her whom he has vowed to cherish and protect. There is generally but little truth in the assertion often made by irascible persons, that their tempers cannot be governed. Few are so irritable that fear will not repress their ebullitions of anger. Among dependents and equals they easily yield to their natural petulance, but they would be far from giving way to it in the presence of a cruel and powerful enemy on whose word their lives depended. If such would only make their principles half as strong as their fears, as they might, by persevering attention to themselves, they would give but little cause of complaint. The moon in all her revolutions keeps the same side towards the earth; and man, if he would but make it one of the strongest rules for his conduct towards her he is bound to love, however dark and forbidding that might be which be presents to the rest of the world. Scarce any disposition is so overgrown with thorns and brambles but the owner if it may, if he will, clear away a little spot and cultivate therein a smiling power for the abode of domestic peace.