industry, and peaceful, unaspiring habits, with which she plods, as you may please to call it, through the duties of her station, whether higher or lower, she is a perpetual example to those beneath her, to like sober assiduity in their own, and to her children’s children to follow in the path in which she leads them.  She may be superintending the household occupations, or actually performing them; giving employment by her wealth to others’ ingenuity, or supplying the want of it by her own, according as her station is, but still she will make many happy.

“I am not so prejudiced as to say that your woman of talent will refuse these duties; of course, if she have principle, she will not.  But literary pursuits must at least divide her attention, if not unfit her altogether for the tasks the order of Providence has assigned her; she will distaste such duties, if she does not refuse them; while the distance at which her attainments place her from ordinary minds, forbid all attempts to imitate or follow her.”

“You have drawn a picture,” answered Mrs. A., “which would convert half the world, if they were not of your mind already, as I believe they are.  It is a picture so beautiful, I would not blot it with the shadow of my finger.  I concede that talent is not necessary to usefulness, and a woman may fulfill every duty of her station without it.  But our question is of comparative usefulness; and there I have something to say.  It is an axiom that knowledge is power; and, if it is, the greater the knowledge, the greater should be the power of doing good.  To men, superior intelligence gives power to dispose, control, and govern the fortunes of others.  To women, it gives influence over their minds.  The greater knowledge which she has acquired of the human heart, gives her access to it in all its subtleties; while her acknowledged superiority secures that deference to her counsels, which weakness ever pays to strength.

“If the circumstances of her condition require it, I believe the greater will suffice the less, and she will fulfill equally well the duties you have enumerated; shedding as bright a light upon her household, as if it bounded her horizon.  Nay, more, there may be minds in her household that need the reciprocation of an equal mind, or the support of a superior one; there may be spirits in her family that will receive from the influence of intellect, what they would not from simple and good intention.  There may be other wants in her neighborhood than hunger and nakedness, and other defaulters than the ignorant and the poor.  Whether she writes, speaks, or acts, the effect is not bounded by time, nor limited by space.  That is worth telling of her, and is repeated from mouth to mouth, which, in an ordinary person, none would notice.  Her acknowledged superiority gives her a title, as well as a capacity to speak, where others must be silent, and carry counsel and consolation where commoner characters might not intrude.