s a side
in the ideal. When one at the theatre saw so many ringlets arranged as
"waterfalls," he laughed and said, they undoubtedly belonged to the
"dead-heads." But Belinda, who wears a waterfall, and at night puts it
into a box, considers the remark a profanity, and confesses that she
never adorns herself with this addition but she thinks of that girl in
France who cherished her long locks, and combed them out with care until
her marriage-day, when she put on a fair white cap, and sold them for
her dowry. There are more poetic locks of hair, it must be said;--the
keepsake of two lovers; the lock of Keats's hair, too sacred to touch,
lying in its precious salvatory. But that is the ideal of the past
belonging to Belinda's waterfall, a trivial, common thing enough, yet
one that has a right to its ideal, nevertheless, if we accept the
ecstasies of a noted writer upon its magic material. "In spinning and
weaving," says he, "the ideal that we pursue is the hair of a woman. How
far are the softest wools, the finest cottons, from reaching it! At what
an enormous distance from this hair all our progress leaves us, and will
forever leave us! We drag behind and watch with envy this supreme
perfection that every day Nature realizes in her play. This hair, fine,
strong, resistant, vibrant in light sonority, and, with all that, soft,
warm, luminous, and electric,--it is the flower of the human flower.
There are idle disputes concerning the merit of its color. What matter?
The lustrous black contains and promises the flame. The blond displays
it with the splendors of the Fleece of Gold. The brown, chatoyant in the
sun, appropriates the sun itself, mingles it with its mirages, floats,
undulates, varies ceaselessly in its brook-like reflections, by moments
smiles in the light or glooms in the shade, deceives always, and,
whatever you say of it, gives you the lie charmingly.--The chief effort
of human industry has combined all methods in order to exalt cotton.
Rare accord of capital, machinery, arts of design, and finally chemical
science, has produced those beautiful results to which England herself
renders homage in buying them. Alas! all that cannot disguise the
original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which has been so much
adorned. If woman, who clothes herself with it in vanity, and believes
herself more beautiful because of it, would but let her hair fall and
unroll its waves over the indigent richness of our most brilliant
clo