LORD BYRON.

EMERSON.

GEORGE MACDONALD.

UNLESS it becomes dominant, the desire to be beautiful is praiseworthy rather than condemnatory. When the Creator bestows a gift upon one of his children, he intends that it shall receive the care and attention necessary to retain, preserve and perfect it. He gives to each a soul and body, a mind and heart, and more or less beauty, and expects the appreciation best shown by our developing to the highest degree, these gifts. Just as a flower withers without sustenance, or a plant becomes dwarfed and bloomless without proper tillage, so does beauty fade and become insignificant unless nourished by care and fostered by cultivation. To be born beautiful gives the favored one a great advantage over her less fortunate sister; but in the race for lasting admiration the latter may prove the victor, for the former may rest in listless though fallacious security upon her beauty, and one day find it gone, or overshadowed by that of her who has fed and nourished, watered and pruned, trained and perfected the smaller share which Nature gave her. A flower cannot be long preserved by sprinkling its petals or foliage. Its roots must receive moisture and be freed

from everything of a destructive nature, its branches gently trained in proper directions, and its sweetness brought forth by a pure atmosphere and genial sunlight, to gladden, until Time shall number its days, all eyes and all hearts near which it blooms.

This, dear readers, is what the Creator intended you to do with yourselves when he gave you life, and it is to help such of you as do not understand this or faint by the way to "grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first," that this book is written and offered you.

Many books upon the same subject have been written and read, but few of them direct a cultivation of the foundation of all beauty. In this volume we have delved deeply into the matter and endeavored to make perfectly plain the rock upon which the structure of true and lasting beauty must be erected. In developing our aim, we have not lost sight of the practical, nor have we placed it beyond the power and circumstances of the children of toil to become as beautiful and lovely as those who know no want. To teach all the pathway leading to the acquirement of beauty has been our main object, and we feel we have accomplished a purpose not hitherto attained.

Except to make drafts upon its most pertinent information, we have dealt lightly with the past, believing that the needs of the present and future are urgent enough to require all the space we could give, and that by this plan we might possibly help develop, in this or the succeeding generation, beauty which shall become a matter of history, quite as much as have the charms of the beautiful women of ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt. Perhaps the ambition is beyond our reach, but if history repeats itself in all things, why should it not in this matter? Be the ambition futile or not, it is with its accomplishment in view, together with the earnest desire to help all to be as lovely as possible—and no one is beyond such assistance—that we submit the volume for your perusal and aid.

ITS ATTAINMENT AND PRESERVATION

BEAUTY DESIRABLE AND OBTAINABLE p15

"The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman." MACAULAY

"It is a great plague to be too handsome a man." PLAUTUS

SHE who has no ambition to be beautiful will never wield the sceptre of womanly power. The chronicles of all ages record that beauty has ever influenced men and leaders of men, whether for good or evil, and until the end of time will they remain captives to its magnetic charm. These facts may seem discouraging to the woman whose mirror tells h& she is undeniably plain, while the silence of friends or their too frank remarks corroborate the tale; but she needs the stimulus which should be aroused by the statement of these truths, to induce her to

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bring to the aid of the poor inheritance Nature has bestowed upon her, all the arts of enhancement which may physically or mentally augment the dower, that she may become happier, wiser, more attractive, and, more than all, better satisfied with herself. Let her remember that a beautiful woman is not always a lovely one, and that a lovely woman is often a very plain one; that a beautiful woman who is not lovely is like a rose without perfume whose charm is gone when its petals are faded; while a lovely woman is like a cluster of mignonette, which will rest on the breast of its wearer till drooping and withered, and afterward still be tenderly cherished for the sweetness of which Time cannot rob it.

George Eliot says, "The beauty of a lovely woman is like music." A woman of her expansive mind uttered no such sentiment in a narrow sense. Its comprehensiveness is proportionate to the grand breadth and depth of her magnificent intellect and means all it could mean. We cannot see music, but we grasp its sounds through the organs of hearing, and hold and feel ifs thrills through that inner sense on which our emotions are indelibly impressed or which remains indifferent, even though the eye and the ear acknowledge supreme satisfaction. The beauty of a simply beautiful woman is like brilliant music which enthralls our senses until ended; but when another as brilliant a selection is begun, our allegiance proves transitory. "The beauty of a lovely woman" is like some sweet song whose cadences come back again and again, mentally mingling with the notes of sparkling fantasias, the madly rushing strains of which are almost lost upon the dreamy listener whose heartstrings Memory is lightly touching.

THE BEAUTY OF LOVELINESS. 17

Loveliness is the sum total of beauty and may or may not include perfection of feature and form. Fortunate, indeed, is the woman to whom the gods have given the form of Venus, the beauty of Juno and the heart of an angel. She cannot help winning universal love and admiration, nor do these offerings spoil her, since vanity lurks not in the kingdom of her mind. But how many women with all these gifts and the virtue of resistance to the wiles of adulation, can each of us number among our friends? In contradistinction can’ we not find many a woman upon whom the gods may not have smiled at birth, but who is so lovely in mind, manners and heart, that her plainness of feature is virtually unnoticed, and the ranks of her admirers never thin out as Time moves along, but in full numbers pay court to her irresistible other charms?

There is no woman possessed of her reasoning faculties and a moderate amount of common sense who may not become lovely if she will, and in becoming lovely many a woman has grown beautiful. It rests with her whether she shall, as women are inclined to do, ever ardently admire beauty in other women and silently grieve because she is not as they are, or whether she shall gird on the armor of resolve and successfully encounter and overcome the foes that have kept imprisoned gifts of Nature, which, though they may be few, are in most cases sufficient for a solid foundation to most enviable loveliness. But she must prepare for a tedious onslaught and frequent overthrows of the new citadel, for those persistent foes—unlovely traits of disposition—will rise again and again and undo all that has been done to conquer them and gain the very first step to perpetual loveliness,

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The beautiful woman can make herself more so by correcting deficiencies of disposition or mind and develop into a queen among women; while her plainer sister may become her rival in loveliness and a loved ruler in her own realm—and what greater happiness can she desire than that wealth of love which every womanly heart craves, and with which every lovely woman is satisfied? Is it not, then, worth the while of every woman, though she possess few personal charms, but whose heart hungers for the adoration which beauty inspires, to endeavor to become lovely, which she can, and beautiful, too, which she may?

The effort to become lovely should not necessarily be confined to womankind. There is a broad field for improvement in this direction among the opposite sex, and many a woman would be vastly helped in her endeavors to please, if "her lord and master," or whatever male relative or friend she may come in contact with, were to administer to his own irritable or otherwise diseased disposition, the wholesome correctives of repression and self-sacrifice and the genial tonics of cheerfulness, kindness and courtesy. A man may be as lovely as a woman without being in the least effeminate; and while it might be "a great plague to be too handsome a man," no man has ever been so lovely in the eyes of the sex to whom he owes allegiance and protection, as to draw upon himself in consequence attentions that either distressed or displeased him. It should not be left for women to become lovely for unlovely men, and it cannot be gainsaid that the controlling influence of a woman’s wish to be beautiful rests almost absolutely upon the natural desire to be pleasing in the sight of the ordained protectors of her sex.

MANLY ATTRACTIVENESS. 19

No woman likes to think of a man as being beautiful. Manliness and such attractiveness of feature and physique as renders him acceptable to all eyes, constitute a woman's ideal; but if manliness and loveliness of disposition are combined, a womanly woman appreciates the man even though he bear no likeness whatever to Apollo the Beautiful. In this respect man is somewhat less generous than woman, and woman’s actual and intuitive knowledge of this deficiency is what so often discourages her from making any effort to become more attractive. Harsh as it may sound, it is, however, mainly woman’s own fault that she remains unlovely and unsought. It is her duty to herself, in the face of all discouragements, to endeavor to become attractive to every one, not taking the male sex alone into consideration—for she may rest assured if she pleases her own sex she will not fail to attract the other; and the satisfaction of being beloved of all will add its beautifying radiance to a countenance from which already shines out purity, kindness, cheerfulness, hope, love, everything which makes a woman lovely even though she be not beautiful.

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