have in mind, this same woman has a share of the
higher and more poetical understanding, frank interest in things for
their own sake, and enduring astonishment at the most common. She is
not to be deceived by custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it
is repeated. I have heard her say she could wonder herself crazy over
the human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of us walk very contentedly
in the little lit circle of their own reason, and have to be reminded of
what lies without by specious and clamant exceptions--earthquakes,
eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in mid-air at a _seance_, and the
like--a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will
own I think it a better sort of mind than goes necessarily with the
clearest views on public business. It will wash. It will find something
to say at an odd moment. It has in it the spring of pleasant and quaint
fancies. Whereas I can imagine myself yawning all night long until my
jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the
other side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the
franchise or the ballot.

The question of professions, in as far as they regard marriage, was only
interesting to women until of late days, but it touches all of us now.
Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The
practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an
hour or two's work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct;
he will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much
better. But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because
so much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is almost
entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers
a continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his
vanity, into good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this
sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always
something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and
flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first law stationer could
put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship,
even made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the "Heloise"
for _dilettante_ ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric
prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities.
It would be well for all of the _genus irritabile_ thus t