The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866, page 179 by Various Authors
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them.
"These are steps in the right direction, and show that our fair country-women, with the grand good sense which is their leading characteristic, are resolved to supply whatever in our national life is wanting.
"I do not fear that women of such sense and energy will listen to the sophistries which would persuade them that elegant imbecility and inefficiency are charms of cultivated womanhood or ingredients in the poetry of life. She alone can keep the poetry and beauty of married life who has this poetry in her soul; who with energy and discretion can throw back and out of sight the sordid and disagreeable details which beset all human living, and can keep in the foreground that which is agreeable; who has enough knowledge of practical household matters to make unskilled and rude hands minister to her cultivated and refined tastes, and constitute her skilled brain the guide of unskilled hands. From such a home, with such a mistress, no sirens will seduce a man, even though the hair grow gray, and the merely physical charms of early days gradually pass away. The enchantment that was about her person alone in the days of courtship seems in the course of years to have interfused and penetrated the home which she has created, and which in every detail is only an expression of her personality. Her thoughts, her plans, her provident care, are everywhere; and the home attracts and holds by a thousand ties the heart which before marriage was held by the woman alone."
POOR CHLOE.
A TRUE STORY OF MASSACHUSETTS IN THE OLDEN TIME.
"Let not ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor."
GRAY'S Elegy.
It was a long, long time ago, before the flame of gas was seen in the streets, or the sounds of the railroad were heard in the land; so long before, that, had any prophet then living foretold such magical doings, he would have be