Formed thus by the relative duties of her
station, she marries from affection, without losing sight of
prudence, and looking beyond matrimonial felicity, she secures her
husband's respect before it is necessary to exert mean arts to
please him, and feed a dying flame, which nature doomed to expire
when the object became familiar, when friendship and forbearance
take place of a more ardent affection. This is the natural death
of love, and domestic peace is not destroyed by struggles to
prevent its extinction. I also suppose the husband to be virtuous;
or she is still more in want of independent principles.
Fate, however, breaks this tie. She is left a widow, perhaps,
without a sufficient provision: but she is not desolate! The pang
of nature is felt; but after time has softened sorrow into
melancholy resignation, her heart turns to her children with
redoubled fondness, and anxious to provide for them, affection
gives a sacred heroic cast to her maternal duties. She thinks that
not only the eye sees her virtuous efforts, from whom all her
comfort now must flow, and whose approbation is life; but her
imagination, a little abstracted and exalted by grief, dwells on
the fond hope, that the eyes which her trembling hand closed, may
still see how she subdues every wayward passion to fulfil the
double duty of being the father as well as the mother of her
children.
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