t
To mourn her frailty still is frail.

'Not so the faded form I prize
And love, because its bloom is gone;
The glory in those sainted eyes
Is all the grace _her_ brow puts on.
And ne'er was Beauty's dawn so bright,
So touching, as that form's decay,
Which, like the altar's trembling light,
In holy lustre wastes away.'

"But the defect of all these modes of warfare on the elegances and
refinements of the toilet was that they were too indiscriminate. They
were in reality founded on a false principle. They took for granted that
there was something radically corrupt and wicked in the body and in the
physical system. According to this mode of viewing things, the body was
a loathsome and pestilent prison, in which the soul was locked up and
enslaved, and the eyes, the ears, the taste, the smell, were all so many
corrupt traitors in conspiracy to poison her. Physical beauty of every
sort was a snare, a Circean enchantment, to be valiantly contended with
and straitly eschewed. Hence they preached, not moderation, but total
abstinence from all pursuit of physical grace and beauty.

"Now, a resistance founded on an over-statement is constantly tending to
reaction. People always have a tendency to begin thinking for
themselves; and when they so think, they perceive that a good and wise
God would not have framed our bodies with such exquisite care only to
corrupt our souls,--that physical beauty, being created in such profuse
abundance around us, and we being possessed with such a longing for it,
must have its uses, its legitimate sphere of exercise. Even the poor,
shrouded nun, as she walks the convent garden, cannot help asking
herself why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by God, all
colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the modest Quaker,
after hanging all her house and dressing all her children in drab,
cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue and yellow and
crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect how very
differently the great All-Father arrays the world's housekeeping. The
consequence of all this has been, that the reforms based upon these
severe and exclusive views have gradually gone backward. The Quaker
dress is imperceptibly and gracefully melting away into a refined
simplicity of modern costume, which in many cases seems to be the
perfection of taste. The obvious reflection, that one color of the
rainbow is quite a