omforting substitute for love.
A just display of these points, in the light of an accurate analysis,
aided by the appropriate learning, can hardly fail to repay the study
it will require. The insight into the nature and the working of the
affections, to be secured by a careful study of the subject, should
be a precious acquisition of knowledge easily convertible into power.
The activity of the sympathies enkindled by tracing the biographical
sketches of a large number of the richest and most winsome examples
of feminine friendship preserved for us in history, should bestow a
rare pleasure. And the plain directions to be deduced from the
discussion and the narratives should furnish a store of instruction
for the wiser guidance of personal experience.

The writer, as he is about to intrust his book upon that current of
literature which flows by the doors of all the intelligent, bearing
its offerings to their hands, is quite aware that the subject of the
rights and the wrongs, the joys and the griefs, the hopes and the
fears, the duties and the plans, belonging to the outer and inner
life of womankind in the present age, happens just now to be one of
the chief matters of popular interest and agitation. This, however,
has had no influence in leading him to treat the subject. It has long
been in his mind. He has been drawn to investigate it and write on it
simply by its intrinsic attractions for him. But the extent and
earnestness with which the public mind is preoccupied by the social
and political discussions of the theme, going on in all quarters,
much increase the difficulty of treating it, as is here proposed,
from the scholarly, moral, and experimental point of view, with
perfect candor and calmness, and with a careful avoidance of
prejudices, exaggerations, and declamatory appeals. Demagogues and
partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private
passion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent
epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical
arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of
those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the
hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every
extremity, and keep in the golden mean of truth and use.

Such a one is also least likely to secure popular praise. The extreme
conclusions, peppery rhetoric, and passionate declamation of the
leaders on both sides, who aim at sensatio