The day
dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered
state of mind; and in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world
seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without
becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of
a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her
proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an
accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been
called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity. You will
not seek in imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this
life, and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be
your state what it may, will bring with them but too much.
"But do not suppose that I disparage the gift which you possess; nor that
I would discourage you from exercising it. I only exhort you so to think
of it, and so to use it, as to render it conducive to your own permanent
good. Write poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and
not with a view to celebrity; the less you aim at that the more likely
you will be to deserve and finally to obtain it. So written, it is
wholesome both for the heart and soul; it may be made the surest means,
next to religion, of soothing the mind and elevating it.
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