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The Female Speaker; Or, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse
The Female Speaker Or Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse Author:Anna Letitia) Barbauld Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sons. The strength, firmness, courage, gravity, and dignity of the man, tally to the softness, delicacy, tenderness of passion, eleganceiof taste, and decency of... more » conversation of the woman. The male mind is formed to defend, deliberate, foresee, contrive, and advise. The female one to confide, imauine, apprehend,comply,and execute. Therefore the proper temperament of these different sexes of minds makes a fine moral union ; and the well-proportioned opposition of different or contrary qualities, like a due mixture of discords in a composition of music, swells the harmony of society raore than if they were all unisons to each other. And this union of moral sexes, if we may express it go, is evidently more conducive to the improvement of each, than if they lived apart. For the man not only protects and advises, but communicates vigour and /resolution to the woman. She, in her turn, softens refines, and polishes him. In her society he finds repose from action and care; in her friendship, the ferment, into which his passions were wrought by the hurry and distraction of public life, subsides and settles into a caim ; a:n! a thousand nameless graces and decencies, that flow from her words and actions, form him for a more mild and elegant deportment. His conversation and example, on the other hand, enlarge her views, raise her sentiments, sustain her resolutions, and free her from a thousand fears and inquietudes, to which her more feeble constitution subjects her. Surely such dispositions, and the happy consequences, which result from them, cannot be supposed to carry an unfriendly aspect to any duty he owes either to God or to man. Fordtce. PROOF OF A FUTURE STATE FROM ANALOGY. IN tracing the nature and destination of any being, we form the surest judgment from his powers of acti...« less