Marion Lightbourn diary

of those who "guide the house" - how important the acquirement of home happiness.!

No discernment, no observation, no self-denial, no drudgery is thrown away which secures such an end.

Lavish upon your home, affection, attention, unselfishness, & banish from it every morbid feeling, all craving after excitement, ever remembering that

"The trivial round, the commont[ary?] Will furnish all we ought to ask: Room to deny ourselves - a road To bring us daily nearer God."

Spenser's Faerie Queen Canto I "Untroubled night they say, gives counsel best." The noblest mind the best content _{x ment has.}

Extract from Home Studies by Miss Yonge.

I rememeber, when I was a growing girl, being much struck by a sentence declaring that all persons may make their own character between fifteen & five and twenty.

One sort of character is very easily made by taking no trouble with oneself _ never exerting the mind, & getting from one kind of amusement to another by the idlest reading or easiest work or chatter that offers

To serve other people there may sometimes be a good deal of pains taken, & this is the best chance for such characters; but how much better worth their services would be if they made the most of themselves?

For it is quite a mistake to think,

that the silly, unintellectual person can be more useful in homely occupations than the sensible cultivated one.

She may perhaps have more readiness, & be more in practice because her taste has lain that way, but she will be slower in understanding directions, less fertile in directions resources & more likely to be led by foolish useless predjudices than will one who has kept her faculties bright, & understands the whys & wherefores of what she does.

Thus, a young maiden who has any real desire to become - I was going to say a valuable member of society but I will put it higher, & say a truly "polished corner of the Temple" will like to

work at her own polishing instead of leaving herself to be polished rubbed down by either ^the tool, or by being shaken up with other stones.

Extract from Pendennis This only we will say - that a good woman is the loveliest flower that blooms under heaven & that we look with wonder & love upon its silent grace, its pure fragrance its delicate bloom of _{x beauty -.}

The Sensitive Plant. Conclusion.

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit ^sat Ere its outword from had known decay Now felt this change I cannot say.

Whether that lady's gentle mind, No longer with the form combined Which scattered love, as stars do light Found sadness, where it left delight

I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.