Though it is one of universal and engrossing human interest, the moralist avoids it, the educator shuns it, and parents taboo it.

It is almost considered indelicate to refer to Love as between the sexes; and young persons are left to gather their only notions of it from the impossible love-stories that fill the shelves of circulating libraries.

This strong and absorbing feeling, this BESOIN D'AIMER--which nature has for wise purposes made so strong in woman that it colours her whole life and history, though it may form but an episode in the life of man--is usually left to follow its own inclinations, and to grow up for the most part unchecked, without any guidance or direction whatever.
Although nature spurns all formal rules and directions in affairs of love, it might at all events be possible to implant in young minds such views of Character as should enable them to discriminate between the true and the false, and to accustom them to hold in esteem those qualities of moral purity and integrity, without which life is but a scene of folly and misery.

It may not be possible to teach young people to love wisely, but they may at least be guarded by parental advice against the frivolous and despicable passions which so often usurp its name.

"Love," it has been said, "in the common acceptation of the term, is folly; but love, in its purity, its loftiness, its unselfishness, is not only a consequence, but a proof, of our moral excellence.