Sentiments are the
outcomings of thoughts, and both together are expressed by actions.
Feed your intelligence with serious thoughts; never amuse it with
those trifles which absorb the attention of persons of your age. Do
not think that those serious thoughts badly become your youth; that
they would deprive you of a part of your comfort, rendering you
wearisome to others and insupportable to yourself; that they would
give you a pedantic and affected air which would lead others to
believe that you despised them; that every age has its peculiar
tastes and customs, and that it would be an act of uncalled-for
severity to exact from a young person just beginning, so to say, the
apprenticeship of life, a gravity of manners and dispositions that
would scarcely be required at a maturer age.
Seriousness is required in all ages, but not always in the same
degree. Thus the gravity befitting a young lady is very different
from that expected from a woman more advanced in years. This virtue,
far from excluding legitimate amusement and pleasure, only regulates
and elevates them by confining them to just limits.
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