the delicacy of feeling peculiar to a brother's regard, and learn to
look on the female character in a light wholly subversive of the
frankness, the purity, the generous care for which earth can yield no
substitute, and the loss of which only transforms him who ought to be
the tender preserver of woman into her heartless destroyer. The girls
are either grouped at home, with the blessed privilege of a father's eye
still upon them, or sent away in a different direction from their
brothers, exposed through unnatural and unpalatable restraints, to evils
not perhaps so great, but every whit as wantonly incurred as the others.
The shyness, miscalled retiring modesty, with which one young lady
shrinks from the notice of a gentleman as though there were danger in
his approach, and the conscious coquettish air, miscalled ease, with
which another invites his notice, are alike removed from the reality of
either modesty or ease. Both result from a fictitious mode of education
--both are the consequences of nipping in the bud those sisterly feelings
that lay a fair foundation for the right use of those privileges to
which she looks forward as a member of society; and if the subject be
viewed through the clear medium of Christian principle, its lights will
become more brilliant, its shadows more dark, the longer and the closer
we contemplate it.




LETTER IV.

YOUTH.


Hitherto you have not heard of any spiritually minded person connected