I shall content myself with simply asking, how friendship can
subsist, when love expires, between the master and his pupil?
I must relieve myself by drawing a different picture.
Let fancy now present a woman with a tolerable understanding, for
I do not wish to leave the line of mediocrity, whose constitution,
strengthened by exercise, has allowed her body to acquire its full
vigour; her mind, at the same time, gradually expanding itself to
comprehend the moral duties of life, and in what human virtue and
dignity consist.
Formed thus by the discharge of the relative duties of her
station, she marries from affection, without losing sight of prudence,
and looking beyond matrimonial felicity, she secures her husband's
respect before it is necessary to exert mean arts to please him and
feed a dying flame, which nature doomed to expire when the object
became familiar, when friendship and forbearance take place of a
more ardent affection.- This is the natural death of love, and
domestic peace is not destroyed by struggles to prevent its
extinction. I also suppose the husband to be virtuous; or she is still
more in want of independent principles.
Fate, however, breaks this tie.- She is left a widow, perhaps,
without a sufficient provision; but she is not desolate! The pang of
nature is felt; but after time has softened sorrow into melancholy
resignation, her heart turns to her children with redoubled
fondness, and anxious to provide for them, affection gives a sacred
heroic cast to her maternal duties.
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