Thou wealth, worth more than kingdoms; I am now
  Confirmed past all suspicion; thou art far
  Sweeter in thy sincere truth than a sacrifice
  Deck’d up for death with garlands.  The Indian winds
  That blow from off the coast and cheer the sailor
  With the sweet savour of their spices, want
  The delight flows in thee.

I have been more affected and interested by this little dramatic picture, than by many a popular love tale; though, as I said before, I do not think it likely either Abstemia or patient Grizzle stand much chance of being taken for a model.  Still I like to see poetry now and then extending its views beyond the wedding-day, and teaching a lady how to make herself attractive even after marriage.  There is no great need of enforcing on an unmarried lady the necessity of being agreeable; nor is there any great art requisite in a youthful beauty to enable her to please.  Nature has multiplied attractions around her.  Youth is in itself attractive.  The freshness of budding beauty needs no foreign aid to set it off; it pleases merely because it is fresh, and budding, and beautiful.  But it is for the married state that a woman needs the most instruction, and in which she should be most on her guard to maintain her powers of pleasing.  No woman can expect to be to her husband all that he fancied her when he was a lover.  Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the sex, as by their own imaginations.  They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.  A woman should, therefore, ascertain what was the charm that rendered her so fascinating when a girl, and endeavour to keep it up when she has become a wife.  One great thing undoubtedly was, the chariness of herself and her conduct, which an unmarried female always observes.  She should maintain the same niceness and reserve in her person and habits, and endeavour still to preserve a freshness and virgin delicacy in the eye of her husband.  She should remember that the province of woman is to be wooed, not to woo; to be caressed, not to caress.  Man is an ungrateful being in love; bounty loses instead of winning him.  The secret of a woman’s power does not consist so much in giving, as in withholding.

A woman may give up too much even to her husband.  It is to a thousand little delicacies of conduct that she must trust to keep alive passion, and to protect herself from that dangerous familiarity, that thorough acquaintance with every weakness and imperfection incident to matrimony.  By these means she may still maintain her power, though she has surrendered her person, and may continue the romance of love even beyond the honeymoon.

“She that hath a wise husband,” says Jeremy Taylor, “must entice him to an eternal dearnesse by the veil of modesty, and the grave robes of chastity, the ornament of meekness, and the jewels of faith and charity.  She must have no painting but blushings; her brightness must be purity, and she must shine round about with sweetness and friendship; and she shall be pleasant while she lives, and desired when she dies.”