ll fortune, hath woven about you
Strong meshes which ye are too helpless to break?
Shall we scornfully wonder, or angrily flout you,
Or strive from their torpor your minds to awake?

Yet, Venus of old, with your queenly derision,
How you would disdain the belle's tawdry array!
_Free footsteps untrammelled_, cool hand of decision,
Sweet laugh like bells pealing, were yours in the day
When you reigned over men by the might of your beauty;
No fetters were o'er you in body or brain;
The world would bow down in the gladness of duty
Could you but awake in your splendor again.

And, Pallas and Venus, if now you were holding
A talk over womanhood, what would you say,
The words of wise counsel while you were unfolding,
If some one should show you these pictures to-day?
I dream of your faces: divinest compassion
Would yearn the poor toiler to pity and save;
And your largeness of scorn would descend on the fashion
Which binds, unresisting, the idler a slave.

[Illustration: 1878. The period of the tie-back, narrow skirts, and
enormous trains.]

The reaction in favor of a more sensible dress which followed was of
brief duration. During this time, however, the long trains were seldom
seen, and thoughtful women began to hope that the arbitrary rule of
fashion was over. It was not long, however, before the panier period
arrived, and what was popularly known as the pull-back was accepted as
the correct style in fashion's world. Of this latter conceit little
need be said, for it has so recently passed from view that all
remember its peculiarity, which to the ordinary observer seemed to be
a settled determination on the part of its originators to render
walking as difficult and fatiguing as possible, while fully exposing
the outline of the wearer's body below the waist at every step. What
in '60 or '70 would have been accounted the height of indecency, is in
the eighties perfectly proper in the fashionable world. During this
time it was not enough to have the skirts very narrow, they must at
every step give the outline of the limbs [or as our Minnesota solon
would put it, _nether_ limbs], hence we find the pull-backs in which
"two shy knees appeared clad in a single trouser."

[Illustration: The tie-backs of 1878 and 1879.]