Beauty's Mission.
Beauty's mission is a noble one, and if kept well apart from pride and frivolity, it is a self-ennobling one.
Beauty has been called a fatal gift. It is so only when the possessor thereof has no other attractions. Every beautiful girl should possess refinement, and by this I do not mean accomplishments that can be shown to advantage in a drawing-room. No, but refinement of mind or soul. She ought to be well read, though far indeed from being a blue-stocking. She ought to be herself a poet at heart, a lover of nature and of God's animals, His trees and His flowers. She ought to be a good but not a garrulous conversationalist; the sentences that leave her lips ought to flow like the murmur and ripple of a sparkling fountain. Forced conversation has no reality about it, and anyone can see it does not come from the heart.
Beauty should be musical. Alas! it is not always so. I may go further and say it is too often automatical. This is the result of a forced musical education. Beauty should never play what she cannot feel. If she feels, so shall others around her, and the chords will touch the heart.
A beautiful woman who can play the violin so as to bring tears to the listener's eyes, possesses a power that nothing on this dull earth of ours can excel.
And a beauty like that which I so feebly paint has a deal to be proud of, though she ought not to be vain. Vanity only proves narrowness of soul, a mind with no breadth of beam.
“She moves a goddess and she looks a queen.”
True enough, yet the greatest of beauties are not simply there for show. For her a nobler part is retained, and ere many years are over her head she ought to be as noble-minded and beautiful a matron as she now is a maiden.
Yes, and if health and beauty go hand-in-hand, with modesty and virtue in their train, this great kingdom of ours will never need to lower its flag to any combination in the world.
I say, then, to every girl-reader I have, “It is well to be beautiful.”