bee, but whether the superior creature could content itself with the insipid and objectless pursuits of the lower one.  The mind requires more to fill it in proportion to the largeness of its grasp:  hope not, therefore, that you could find either their peace or their satisfaction in the purse-netting, embroidering lives of your thoughtless companions.  Even to them, be sure, hours of deep weariness must come:  no human being, whatever her degree on the scale of mind, is capable of being entirely satisfied with a life without object and without improvement.  Remember, however, that it is not at all by the comparative contentedness of their mere animal existence that you can test the qualifications of a habit of life to constitute your own happiness; that must stand on a far different basis.

In the case of a very early marriage, there may be indeed no opportunity for the weariness of which I have above spoken.  The uneducated and uncultivated girl who is removed from the school-room to undertake the management of a household may not fall an early victim to ennui; that fate is reserved for her later days.  Household details (which are either degrading or elevating according as they are attended to as the favourite occupations of life, or, on the other hand, skilfully managed as one of its inevitable and important duties) often fill the mind even more effectually to the exclusion of better things than worsted-work or purse-netting would have done.  The young wife, if ignorant and uneducated, soon sinks from the companion of her husband, the guide and example of her children, into the mere nurse and housekeeper.  A clever upper-servant would, in nine cases out of ten, fulfil all the offices which engross her time and interest a thousand times better than she can herself.  For her, however, even for the nurse and housekeeper, the time of ennui must come; for her it is only deferred.  The children grow up, and are scattered to a distance; requiring no further mechanical cares, and neither employing time nor exciting the same kind of interest as formerly.  The mere household details, however carefully husbanded and watchfully self-appropriated, will not afford amusement throughout the whole day; and, utterly unprovided with subjects for thought or objects of occupation, life drags on a wearisome and burdensome chain.  We have all seen specimens of this, the most hopeless and pitiable kind of ennui, when the time of acquiring habits of employment, and interest in intellectual pursuits is entirely gone, and resources can neither be found in the present, or hoped for in the future.  Hard is the fate of those who are bound to such victims by the ties of blood and duty.  They must suffer, secondhand, all the annoyances which ennui inflicts on its wretched victims.  No natural sweetness of temper can long resist the depressing influence of dragging on from day to day an uninterested, unemployed existence; and besides, those who can find no occupation