the demands of mere carelessness, are you acting as a faithful steward by thus expending it?  I willingly grant to you that some women are so wealthy, placed in situations requiring so much representation, that it would be degrading to them to take much thought about any thing but the beauty and fashion of their clothes; and that an anxiety on their part about the preservation of, to them, trifles would indicate meanness and parsimoniousness.  Their office is to encourage trade by a lavish expenditure, conformable to the rank in life in which God has placed them.  Happy are they if this wealth do not become a temptation too hard to be overcome!  Happier those from whom such temptations, denounced in the word of God more strongly than any other, are entirely averted!

This is your position; and as much as it is the duty of the very wealthy to expend proportionally upon their dress, so is it yours to be scrupulously economical, and to bring down your aspiring thoughts from the regions of poetry and romance to the homely duties of mending and caretaking.  There will be poetry and romance too in the generous and useful employment you may make of the money thus economised.  Besides, if you do not yet see that they exist in the smallest and homeliest of every-day cares, it is only because your mind has not been sufficiently developed by experience to find poetry and romance in every act of self-control and self-denial.

There is, I believe, a general idea that genius and intellectual pursuits are inconsistent with the minute observations and cares that I have been recommending; and by nature perhaps they are so.  The memoirs of great men are filled with anecdotes of their incompetency for commonplace duties, their want of observation, their indifference to details:  you may observe, however, that such men were great in learning alone; they never exhibited that union of action and thought which is essential to constitute a heroic character.

We read that a Charlemagne and a Wallenstein could stoop, in the midst of their vast designs and splendid successes, to the cares of selling the eggs of their poultry-yard,[68] and of writing minute directions for its more skilful management.[69] A proper attention to the repair of the strings of your gowns or the ribbons of your shoes could scarcely be farther, in comparison, beneath your notice.

The story of Sir Isaac Newton’s cat and kitten has often made you smile; but it is no smile of admiration:  such absence of mind is simply ridiculous.  If, indeed, you should refer to its cause you may by reflection ascertain that the concentration of thought secured by such abstraction, in his particular case, may have been of use to mankind in general; but you must at the same time feel that he, even a Sir Isaac Newton, would have been a greater man had his genius been more universal, had it extended from the realms of thought into those of action.

With women the same case is much stronger; their minds are seldom, if ever, employed on subjects the importance and difficulty of which might make amends for such concentration of thought as would necessarily, except in first-rate minds, produce abstraction and inattention to homely every-day duties.