You should prefer your mother's company to
that of all others. Her life should be as a book constantly open
before you; her lessons and examples, her experience and counsels
should be an inexhaustible mine of instruction, useful and precious
to your soul.
The young lady is indeed an object of compassion who feels her
mother's company irksome and onerous. At your age the heart is
confiding and effusive, and it needs some bosom in which to repose
its confidence; for it would be subjecting it to an ordeal too rude,
and exposing it perhaps to a fatal reaction, by completely depriving
it of consolations derived from acquaintances approved by every law,
human and divine. It should be treated with moderation, founded on
prudence, as undue severity renders its desires and needs more
imperative.
But if it is dangerous to restrict the heart to silence and inaction
it is much more dangerous to feed it on frivolous affections. There
is nothing that exhausts its energies so much as an over-indulgence
in those puerile sentiments fed by the imagination. Those sentiments
create within it a void which nothing can fill, and destroy its love
for everything that is noble and generous.
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