ed their gratifications.
New perceptions are the scouts of fresh desires; fresh desires
precede their own fulfilment: a just reconciliation is a slow,
historic process. The lives of a multitude of women all around us
contain a large element of unsuccessful outward or inward ambitions,
vain attempts and prayers. This drives them back upon themselves,
into a deeper and sadder seclusion than that naturally imposed by
their housekeeping and their historic withdrawment from the bustling
businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of
instances, a tragedy not less severe than unobtrusive is enacted, the
tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs
exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The
proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself
in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of
defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase
of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements,
arrangements both more economical and more truthful. In the mean
time, every thing which tends to inflame the exclusive passion of
love, to stimulate thought upon it, or to magnify its imagined
importance, contributes so much to enhance the misery of its
withholding or loss, and thus to augment an evil already lamentably
extensive and severe.

Now, the most healthful and effective antidote for the evils of an
extravagant passion is to call into action neutralizing or
supplementary passions; to balance the excess of one power by
stimulating weaker powers, and fixing attention on them; to assuage
disappointments in one direction by securing gratifications in
another. Accordingly, the offices of friendship in the lives of
women, lives often so secluded, impoverished, and self-devouring, is
a subject of emphatic timeliness; promising, if properly treated, to
yield lessons of no slight practical value. This vein of sentiment
has suffered unmerited neglect among us. No other vein of sentiment
in human nature, perhaps, has so much need to be cherished. In the
lives of women, friendship is, First, the guide to love; a
preliminary stage in the natural development of affection. Secondly,
it is the ally of love; the distributive tendrils and branches to the
root and trunk of affection. Thirdly, it is, in some cases, the
purified fulfilment and repose into which love subsides, or rises.
Fourthly, it is, in other cases, the c