... Every mother's
daughter of you _can_ be beautiful. You can envelop yourselves in an
atmosphere of moral and intellectual beauty, through which your
otherwise plain faces will look forth like those of angels. Beautiful to
Ledyard, stiffening in the cold of a northern winter, seemed the
diminutive, smoke-stained women of Lapland, who wrapped him in their
furs, and ministered to his necessities with kindness and gentle words
of compassion. Lovely to the homesick heart of Park seemed the dark
maids of Sego, as they sung their low and simple song of welcome beside
his bed, and sought to comfort the white stranger who had 'no mother to
bring him milk, and no wife to grind him corn.' Oh, talk as we may
of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble, or wrought out on
canvas!... what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The
heart feels a beauty of another kind. Looking through the outward
environment, it discovers a deeper and more real loveliness."
Girls are so often afraid of the commonplace in people that they will
not marry unless some one, with a true or false claim to distinction,
offers himself. We have seen quite a company of girls charmed with
the "de" or the "von" attached to a man's name. Every foreign capital
can show its scores of American girls who have made themselves
ridiculous by giving up property, home, American ideas, and American
ways,--alas! by giving up much that stands for character,--for the sake
of marrying a "pendant to a moustache," said moustache belonging to a
worn-out title, and being in need of money to keep its ends waxed.
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