I have long been persuaded that there is no such thing as an honest private journal, even where the entries are punctually made under present impressions. There is so much of positive, active evil always at work in the mind, that to give a fair transcript of idle unprofitable thoughts and corrupt imaginings, is out of the question: evil is dealt with in generals, good in particulars, and the balance cannot be fairly struck. Those confessions of indwelling sin that remorse will wring from us, and which perhaps are penned at the moment in perfect sincerity, being unaccompanied with, the specifications that would invest them in their naturally hideous colors, beneath the searching light of God's holy and spiritual law, wear the lovely garb of unfeigned humility. The reader, coming to such self-condemnatory clauses, is struck with admiration at the saintly writer's marvellous self-abasement, only lamenting that he should, in the excess of his lowly-mindedness, have written such, bitter things against himself, at a time when he was grieving, resisting, almost quenching the Holy Spirit within by obstinate transgression.

And if the present, how much more is the past liable to be glossed over? To be faithful here is next to impossible, for Satan helps us to deceive ourselves and instructs us to carry out the deception to others. This consideration might well cause the pen of autobiography to drop from a Christian's hand, did not an earnest desire to glorify God in his merciful dealings, together with the consciousness that to no other could the task he safely delegated, act as a counterpoise to the discouragement. I do desire to magnify the exceeding riches of God's grace to me, if I may do so without increasing the charge of arrogant assumption. I know that among the diversity of gifts which he bestows on his creatures, he granted me a portion of mental energy, a quickness of perception, a liveliness of imagination, an aptitude for expressing the thoughts that were perpetually revolving in my mind, such as to fit me for literary occupation. I know that Satan, to whom such instruments are exceedingly valuable, marked me as one who would, if properly trained to it, do his work effectually within his own sphere; and I am not more sure of my present existence than I am of the fact that he strove to secure me for that purpose, from the first expanding of those faculties which evidently lie exposed to his observation and open to his attacks, as far as God permits him to work. Can I feel all this, and not bless the Lord, who so far baffled these designs, and deigned to appoint my field of labor within the sacred confines of his own vineyard?

The visitation of which I have spoken had a powerful influence on my after-life; it rendered the preservation of my newly-restored sight an object of paramount importance, to which the regular routine of education must needs be sacrificed. A boarding-school had never been thought of for me. My parents loved their children too well to meditate their expulsion from the paternal roof; and the children so well loved their parents and each other that such a separation would have been insupportable to them. Masters we had in the necessary branches of education, and we studied together so far as I was permitted to study; but before it was deemed safe to exercise my eyes with writing apparatus, I had stealthily possessed myself of a patent copy-book, by means of which, tracing the characters as they shone through the paper, I was able to write with tolerable freedom before any one knew that I could join two letters; and I well remember my father's surprise, not unmixed with annoyance, when he accidentally took up a letter which I had been writing to a distant relation, giving a circumstantial account of some domestic calamity which had no existence but in my brain; related with so much pathos too, that my tears had fallen over the slate whereon this my first literary attempt was very neatly traced. He could not forbear laughing; but ended with a grave shake of the head, and a remark to the effect that I was making more haste than good speed.

At this time, seven years of age, I became entangled in a net of dangerous fascination. One evening my brother was taken to the theatre, while I, on account of a cold, had to stay at home. To compensate for this, I was permitted to read the play to him; and that play was, "The Merchant of Venice." I will not dwell upon the effect. I had already become fond of such theatrical spectacles as were considered suitable for children—pantomime and broad farce—and like a child I gazed upon the glitter, and enjoyed the bustle; but now, seated in a corner, all quiet about me, and nothing to interfere with the mental world, I drank a cup of intoxication under which my brain reeled for many a year. The character of Shylock burst upon me, even as Shakspeare had conceived it. I revelled in the terrible excitement that it gave rise to; page after page was stereotyped upon a most retentive memory without an effort, and during a sleepless night I feasted on the pernicious sweets thus hoarded in my brain.

Pernicious indeed they were; for from that hour my diligence in study, my docility of conduct, every thing that is usually regarded as praiseworthy in a child, sprung from a new motive. I wanted to earn a reward, and that was no longer a sweet story from the Bible, but permission to carry into my retreat a volume of Shakspeare. A taste so unusual at my age was hailed with applause; visitors questioned me on the different plays, to ascertain my intimate acquaintance with the characters; but no one, not even my father, could persuade me to recite a line, or to listen when another attempted it, or to witness the representation of any play of Shakspeare. This I mention to prove what a powerful hold the enemy of all godliness must have expected to take on a spirit so attuned to romance. Reality became insipid, almost hateful to me; conversation, except that of the literary men to whom I have alluded, a burden. I imbibed a thorough contempt for women, children, and household affairs, intrenching myself behind invisible barriers that few, very few, could pass. Oh how many wasted hours, how much of unprofitable labor, what wrong to my fellow-creatures, what robbery of God, must I refer to this ensnaring book. My mind became unnerved, my judgment perverted, my estimate of people and things wholly falsified, and my soul wrapped in the vain solace of unsubstantial enjoyments during years of after sorrow, when but for this I might have early sought the consolations of the gospel. Parents know not what they do, when from vanity, thoughtlessness, or overindulgence, they foster in a young girl what is called a poetical taste. Those things highly esteemed among men are held in abomination with God; they thrust him from his creatures' thoughts, and enshrine a host of polluting idols in his place.

My father, I am sure, wished to check the evil which, as a sensible man, he could not but foresee; my state of health, however, won a larger portion of indulgence than was good for me. The doctors into whose hands I had fallen, were of the school now happily very much exploded: they had one panacea for almost every ill, and that was the perilous drug mercury. With it, they rather fed than physicked me; and its deleterious effects on the nervous system were doubly injurious to me, as increasing tenfold the excitability that required every curb. Among all the marvels of my life, the greatest is that of my having grown up to be one of the healthiest of human beings, and with an inexhaustible flow of even mirthful spirits; for certainly I was long kept hovering on the verge of the grave by the barbarous excess to which medical experiments were carried; and I never entertained a doubt that the total loss of my hearing before I was ten years old, was owing to a paralysis induced by such severe treatment. God, however, had his own purposes to work out, which neither Satan nor man could hinder. He overruled all for the furtherance of his own gracious designs.

Shut out by this last dispensation from my two delightful resources, music and conversation, I took refuge in books with tenfold avidity. By this time I had added the British poets generally to my original stock, together with such reading as is usually prescribed for young ladies; and I underwent the infliction of reading aloud to my mother the seven mortal volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. It was in the fulfilment of this awful task that I acquired a habit particularly mischievous and ensnaring—that of reading mechanically, with a total abstraction of mind from what I was about. This became the easier to me from the absence of all external sound; and its consequences are exceedingly distressing to this day, as experienced in a long-indulged, and afterwards most bitterly lamented wandering of the mind in prayer and in reading the Scriptures. In fact, through the prevalence of this habit, my devotions, always very punctually performed, became such an utter lip-service, as frequently to startle and terrify my conscience, when I found myself saying prayers and thinking idle songs or scraps of plays; but I regarded such transient pangs of remorse as a satisfaction for the sin, and never dreamed of resisting the general habit.

Thus far I had led a town life, residing in the heart of a populous city, enjoying indeed that noble garden, but daily more and more absorbed in books of fancy. Happily, my health became so affected that a removal into the country was judged necessary, and I forgave the doctors all their past persecution of me, in consideration of their parting injunctions, which were, that I was to have unbounded liberty; to live entirely in the open air, save when the weather forbade; to be amused with all rural occupations; and especially to frequent farm-yards, for the purpose of inhaling the breath of cows. My father exchanged parochial duty with a friend, taking his village congregation, and engaging a house very near the church.

That tall white house, what a place it holds in my fond recollection. It was perfectly an old parsonage, and behind it lay a garden larger than our city orchard, sloping gently down, with a profusion of fruit and flowers, bounded by high walls, and the central walk terminating in a door, beyond which lay the scene of our greatest enjoyment. A narrow slip of grass, fringed with osiers and alders and willows, alone separated the wall from a very clear, lovely stream, which winding half round an extensive common, turned a mill. This small river abounded with fish, and we soon became expert anglers; besides which, on creeping to some distance by a path of our own discovery, we could cross the stream on a movable plank, and take a wide range through, the country. This removal was a double resource: it invigorated my bodily frame, until I outgrew and out-bloomed every girl of my age in the neighborhood, while really laying a foundation for many years of uninterrupted health, and a constitution to defy the change of climate for which I was destined; while it won me from the sickening, enervating habit of sedentary enjoyment over the pages of a book, which, added to the necessary studies and occupations, was relaxing alike the tone of the bodily and mental frame. From the polluted works of man, I was drawn to the glorious works of God; and never did bird of the air or beast of the field more luxuriate in the pure bright elements of nature than I did. All the poetical visions of liberty that had floated in my brain seemed now realized; all pastoral descriptions faded before the actual enjoyment of rural life. Sometimes wreathing garlands of, wild flowers, reclined on a sunny bank, while a flock of sheep strolled around, and the bold little lambs came to peep in our faces, and then gallop away in pretended alarm; sometimes tearing our clothes to tatters in an ardent hunt for the sweet filberts that hung high above our heads, on trees well fortified behind breastworks of bramble and thorn; sometimes cultivating the friendship while we quaffed the milk of the good-natured cows under the dairymaid's operation: all was freedom, mirth, and peace. Often would my father take his noble pointers preparatory to the shooting season, at once to try their powers and to ascertain what promise of future sport the fields presented. These were destructive expeditions in one sense. I remember the following dialogue, repeated to me by my brother, when we made our appearance at home after a day's demolition of wearing apparel.

"Mr. B. this will never do; that girl cannot wear a frock twice without soiling it; nor keep it whole for a week: the expense will ruin us."

"Well, my dear, if I am to be ruined by expense, let it come in the shape of the washerwoman's and linen-draper's bills, not in those of the apothecary and undertaker."

My dear father was right; and it would be a happy thing for girls in general, if somewhat of appearance, and of acquirement too, was sacrificed to what God has so liberally provided, and to the enjoyment of which a blessing is undoubtedly annexed. Where, among females, do we find the stamina of constitution and the elasticity of spirit which exist in those of our rural population who follow outdoor employment? It positively pains me to see a party of girls, a bonneted and tippeted double-file of humanity,

"That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along,"

under the keen surveillance of a governess, whose nerves would never be able to endure the shock of seeing them bound over a stream and scramble through a fence, or even toss their heads and throw out their limbs as all young animals, except that oppressed class called young ladies, are privileged to do. Having ventured, in a fit of my country daring, to break the ice of this very rigid and frigid subject, I will recount another instance of the paternal good sense to which I owe, under God, the physical powers without which my little talent might have been laid by in a napkin all my days.

One morning, when his daughter was about eight years old, my father came in, and found sundry preparations going on, the chief materials for which were buckram, whalebone, and other stiff articles, while the young lady was under measurement by the hands of a female friend.

"Pray, what are you going to do to the child?"

"Going to fit her with a pair of stays."

"For what purpose?"

"To improve her figure; no young lady can grow up properly without them."

"I beg your pardon; young gentlemen grow up very well without them, and so may young ladies."

"O, you are mistaken. See what a stoop she has already; depend on it this girl will be both a dwarf and a cripple if we don't put her into stays."

"My child may be a cripple, ma'am, if such is God's will; but she shall be one of his making, not ours."

All remonstrance was vain; stays and every species of tight dress were strictly prohibited by the authority of one whose will was, as every man's ought to be, absolute in his own household. He also carefully watched against any evasion of the rule: a ribbon drawn tightly round my waist would have been cut without hesitation by his determined hand; while the little girl of the anxious friend whose operations he had interrupted, enjoyed all the advantages of that system from which I was preserved. She grew up a wandlike figure, graceful and interesting, and died of decline at nineteen; while I, though not able to compare shapes with a wasp or an hour-glass, yet passed muster very fairly among mere human forms of God's moulding; and I have enjoyed to this hour a rare exemption from headaches, and other ladylike maladies, that appear the almost exclusive privilege of women in the higher classes.

This is no trivial matter, believe me; it has frequently been the subject of conversation with professional men of high attainment, and I never met with one among them who did not, on hearing that I never but once, and then only for a few hours, submitted to the restraint of these unnatural machines, refer to that exemption, as a means, the free respiration, circulation, and powers both of exertion and endurance with which the Lord has most mercifully gifted me. There can be no doubt that the hand which first encloses the waist of a girl in these cruel contrivances, supplying her with a fictitious support, where the hand of God has placed bones and muscles that ought to be brought into vigorous action, that hand lays the foundation of bitter sufferings; at the price of which, and probably of a premature death, the advantage must be purchased of rendering her figure as unlike as possible to all the models of female beauty, universally admitted to be such, because they are chiselled after nature itself. I have seen pictures, and I have read harrowing descriptions, of the murderous consequences of thus flying in the face of the Creator's skill, and presuming to mend, to improve, his perfect work; but my own experience is worth a thousand treatises and ten thousand illustrations, in bringing conviction to my mind. Once, when introduced, as it is called, to the public, through the medium of a ballroom, I did join in persuading my father to allow of a fashionable lacing-up, though by no means a tight one. I felt much as, I suppose, a frolicksome young colt feels when first subjected to the goading apparatus that fetters his wild freedom. I danced, but it was with a heavy heart and laboring breath; I talked, under the influence of a stupefying headache, and on my return home flew to my apartment and cut the goodly fabric in pieces; nor was I ever afterwards tempted so to tempt my all-wise Maker by saying to the frame that he had fashioned and supplied with means of healthful growth, "Hitherto shalt thou go and no further."

Compressure of the feet was with equal strictness forbidden by my judicious father. This vain custom is perhaps not so fatal as the other, but it produces many evils. Coldness of the extremities may certainly exist where nothing of the kind has been practised; but while rejoicing that I, experimentally, know nothing of it, I cannot help recollecting that the bounding pulse which plays so joyously through my veins was never impeded in any part; and feeling this, I would no more expose a girl to one infliction than I would to the other. Do Christian mothers take a sufficiently serious and prayerful view of this subject, as regards their children? Do they weigh, in a balance of God's providing, this necessary provision of clothing, to separate not only what is unseemly for the woman professing godly simplicity, but what is enervating to those physical powers which she is bound to devote to the Lord, and the weakening of which is actual robbery of him? I fear we females are more ready to ask counsel one of another in this matter than of the Lord; or even of our husbands, who, in nine cases out of ten, no doubt would decide against the foolish and pernicious custom. At least, in all my arguments with my own sex, I have found the men invariably siding with me upon this topic.

You will be tired of these digressions, my dear friend, but I set out by forewarning you that my opinions would be freely stated; and while touching on a period of mortal life, where the body no less than the mind usually takes its direction for the rest of our pilgrimage, I cannot pass by any thing that appears to me of real importance to either. We will now return to what poets have sung and citizens sighed for, time out of mind—the delights of rural life.

All cramping is decidedly bad: wholesome restraints there are, which parents are bound to lay upon their children, and the latter to submit to; and among other things, I am sure a defined method and regular habits in education, work, and play, together, with a most strict attention to scrupulous punctuality, are not only valuable but indispensable to a right government of the mind and conduct in after- life. I have daily cause to lament the unavoidable neglect of such a system in my own case, during three important years; but unavoidable it was, unless my life had been sacrificed to the maintenance of such order. Accordingly, mine was the life of a butterfly; and whatever of the busy bee has since appeared in my proceedings must be ascribed to divine grace alone. I often recall those days of summer sunshine to which I have alluded; and the scarcely less joyous winter season, when, ploughing the light snow, we raced with our inseparable companion, the favorite pointer, or built up a brittle giant for the glory of demolishing him with balls of his own substance, or directed the soft missiles against each other. Accompanied by our father, but never alone, we made excursions upon our frozen stream; and very sweet it was to the fond hearts of my tender parents to watch the mantling glow of health, the elastic vigor of increasing stature, and the unbounded play of most exuberant spirits, in the poor child whom they had expected to enclose in an early grave. How often, seated on the low wide brick-work corner of the immense fireplace in a neighboring farm-house, have I been smoked among hams and tongues, while watching the progress of baking a homely cake upon those glowing wood-embers, or keeping guard over a treasury of apples, nuts, and elderberry wine, all streaming together in the lusciousness of a promised feast? Patriotism is with me no inert principle; it verily lives and acts and pervades my whole spirit; and I believe its energetic character, except as God deigns to work by his especial influence, is traceable to that early acquaintance with what is most purely English among us—the homes and the habits of our own bold yeomanry.

Cities may resemble one another, and the aping propensities of their inhabitants produce among them a rapid approximation of appearance and manners; but where shall we look for the counterpart of a rural English HOME? The thing is as untransferable as the word is untranslatable. The antique village church, with its broad square tower or low spire, its stone porch and oak seats, its narrow casements and the many vestiges of those abominations which the besom of the blessed Reformation swept from our services, though it could not, without demolishing the building, efface their relics from its walls; the churchyard surrounding its base, with undulating hillocks of mortality clad in long, rich grass, where lie, half hidden, the old grey monumental stones that can no longer tell the tale of bygone generations; the more modern sculpture, and the homely grave-rail standing sentry over the last resting-place of the poor, while some venerable tree overshadows the ground, where it has probably stood since the first stone of that modest temple was laid by our forefathers—all these are so endearingly English. The broad, rich fields, the hedgerow boundaries and stately lines of vigorous trees guarding their native soil; and above all, the manly bearing of a bold, an independent, and a peaceful peasantry, the humblest of whom knows that his cottage is a chartered sanctuary, protected alike from the aggressions of civil and of ecclesiastical tyranny—these, too, are English, sacredly English; and they leave upon the heart that has once expanded among them, an impress never to be effaced. Among national reformers, what a noble position would he occupy who should prevail upon our monied countrymen to exchange their habits of periodical vagrancy into popish lands, for a sojourn in the moral districts of their own Protestant England, in the confidence that the climate which agreed with their fathers from generation to generation—as the dates and ages decipherable on our monuments will testify—would not annihilate them; and that the sphere in which God had seen good to place them was that wherein he purposed them to move, to exert their influence, and to occupy for his glory, with the talents committed to their charge.

I have told you how books of imagination had supplanted the Bible in my esteem; those books now, in a measure, yielded to the irresistible attraction of outdoor amusement; but my mind was so abundantly stored with the glittering tinsel of unsanctified genius, as it shone forth in the pages of my beloved poets, that no room was left for a craving after better studies. Yet the turn of my mind was devotional in the extreme; so much so, that had the Lord permitted me at that time to come in contact with the wily fascinations of popery, I am sure I should have fallen, for a season at least, into the snare. God was really in all my thoughts; not as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—not as a being of purer eyes than to behold iniquity—not as He whom I was required to glorify in my body and in my spirit, being bought with a price, to be no longer my own but his; no, my religion was a very attractive sort of Deism, which recognized the Creator of all those things wherein I delighted, and thought to render him great honor by such recognition. Thomson's "Hymn on the Seasons" was my body of divinity; and Pope's atrocious "Universal Prayer" would have become my manual of devotion, had not my father denounced it as a most blasphemous outrage upon revelation, and charged me never to repeat what he deeply regretted that I had committed to memory. I hated profanity, and would not have omitted the private repetition of a form of prayer, morning or evening, on any account, nor absented myself from public worship. A slighting expression applied to the Bible would kindle me into glowing resentment, expressed with no less sincerity than earnestness, and as a matter of duty I devoted some time every Sabbath-day to the perusal of God's word, with which I had become more extensively acquainted by reading it during sermon-time at church. I well know that even then, and at a much earlier period too, conviction of my own sinfulness was working very deeply, though not permanently, in my mind: it was not an abiding impression, but a thing of fits and starts, overwhelming me while it lasted, but soon shaken off by diverting my thoughts to something else. These convictions were unquestionably the result of my occasional readings in God's book: they always occurred during or immediately after such perusal, or when some passage was suddenly brought to my recollection.