age of your influence, to secure a sanction
of the wrong. But lead your mother, and aspire yourself, toward perfect
integrity, and the sinlessness of heaven. Let the portraiture of a holy
life be drawn on the canvass before you; then will you enjoy the sweet
anticipation, as your tears bedew her grave,

"My mother--where thou art gone
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown.
May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore,
The parting word shall pass my lips no more."

If the claims of a parent be such as I have described, then no defect of
character, still less any outward deficiency, can justify the daughter
in a disregard of father or mother. Wealth does not increase the filial
obligations, neither does poverty diminish them. Honors, dress, fashion
did not lay the foundation of your duty to love and respect your
parents. Let them then live in obscurity, or be constrained to wear
plain apparel, or have unfashionable furniture, or lack graceful
manners, none the less are you solemnly bound to honor and comfort them.

There is one circumstance, especially, which leads some young ladies
cruelly to neglect their parents, and yet with no reason whatever. The
daughter has received a better education than they; she has spent a few
months, perhaps, at a boarding school, and learnt music and French. But
what are these, and all her accomplishments worth, if they have but
taught her to despise or neglect her truest benefactors? Can she cast
off, in their old age, those who toiled and bore unnumbered burdens, to
procure for her these literary privileges? If she do this, then, woe to
her; and woe to the unfortunate being, to whom she may be joined as a
partner. For no sin does the curse of Heaven more surely descend on one,
let it be delayed as it may, than for unkindness to parents.

Nor does their guilt dissolve the bonds of filial duty. Every offender
deserves more our pity than our cruelty or wrath. Who then should be
commiserated and watched over, whose evil should we seek to overcome
with good, and whose heart to melt by love, if not an offending
parent's?

Another relation, happily suited to promote female virtue, is that of
Brother and Sister. Here are those united, not only by nature, but by
all those sacred and dear ties which belong to the associations of
childhood. Theirs is not the conjunction for an evening of planets,
whose orbits lie all apart; but it is a union that dates from the
earliest moment