A condition for
using justly and gaily any decoration would seem to be a measure of
reluctance. Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world
decivilized--was in the beginning intended to be something jocund; and
jocundity was never to be achieved but by postponement, deference, and
modesty. Nor can the prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in
dispute. For Nature has something even more severe than modertion: she
has an innumerable singleness. Her buttercup meadows are not prodigal;
they show multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly
the disgrace of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his
delights? or who has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his
wishes--the prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous
Fate that man should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her
answer every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day
when she shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--and
make it perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate. What, for
novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the
last? Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of your
mouth are all numbered.

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM

It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of
man is so much to be desired. The leg, completing as it does the form of
man, should make a great part of that human scenery which is at least as
important as the scenery of geological structure, or the scenery of
architecture, or the scenery of vegetation, but which the lovers of
mountains and the preservers of ancient buildings have consented to
ignore. The leg is the best part of the figure, inasmuch as it has the
finest lines and therewith those slender, diminishing forms which, coming
at the base of the human structure, show it to be a thing of life by its
unstable equilibrium. A lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium; the
body, springing, poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, never
stands without implying and expressing life. It is the leg that first
suggested the phantasy of flight. We imagine wings to the figure that is
erect upon the vital and tense legs of man; and the herald Mercury,
because of his station, looks new-lighted. All this is true of the best
leg, and the best leg is the man's. That of the young child, in which
the Italian schools of painting delighted,