CHAPTER IX.
"A perfect woman, nobly planned; To warn, to counsel, to command, The reason firm, the temperate will, Prudence, foresight, strength, and skill." WORDSWORTH.
The beautiful ideal of Wordsworth seemed realized in Mrs.Carlton.

She was by nature impetuous, and even irritable; but the careful training of her deeply pious mother early eradicated these seeds of discord and future misery.

She reared her "in the way she should go," and taught her to "remember her Creator in the days of her youth." Crushing vanity, which soon rose hydra-headed in her path, she implanted in her daughter's heart a sense of her own unworthiness, and led her to the "fountain of light and strength." Under her judicious care, Ellen's character was molded into perfect beauty.

She became a Christian, in the purest sense of the term.

Hers were not the gloomy tenets of the anchorite, which, with a sort of Spartan stoicism, severs every tie enjoined by his great Creator, bids adieu to all of joy that earth can give, and becomes a devotee at the shrine of some canonized son of earth, as full of imperfections as himself.