associations, "The Mother's Meeting."

For eleven years, Mary E. Hawes, afterwards Mrs. Van Lennep, was an
attentive and interested listener to the instructions given to the
children at our quarterly meetings--and it is interesting to know that
her mother regards the influence of those meetings as powerfully aiding
in the formation of her symmetrical Christian character.

An eminent painter once said to us, that he always disliked to attempt
the portrait of a woman; it was so difficult to give to such a picture
the requisite boldness of feature and distinctness of individual
expression, without impairing its feminine character. If this be true in
the delineation of the outer and material form, how much more true is it
of all attempts to portray the female mind and heart! If the words and
ways, the style of thinking and the modes of acting, all that goes to
make up a biography, have a character sufficiently marked to
individualize the subject, there is a danger that, in the relating, she
may seem to have overstepped the decorum of her sex, and so forfeit the
interest with which only true delicacy can invest the woman.

It is strange that biography should ever succeed. To reproduce any thing
that was transient and is gone, not by repetition as in a strain of
music, but by delineating the emotions it caused, is an achievement of
high art. An added shade of coloring shows you an enthusiast, and loses
you the confidence and sympathy of your cooler listener. A shade
subtracted leaves so faint a hue that you have lost your interest in
your own faded picture, and of course, cannot command that of another.
Even an exact delineation, while it may convey accurately a part of the
idea of a character, is not capable of transmitting the more volatile
and subtle shades. You may mix your colors never so cunningly, and copy