"The second tree was in a soil torn up and bruised—the plants of which were freezing under a cold wind. Its branches were matted and black. No light penetrated them. The sky above was of ebony. The rainbow was not there. This tree was Despair. Alas! for the beauty of Love! Is it not pushed from its stool by Despair?
"The third tree was in a soil firm to the eye, but undermined by the molewarp. Its scathed branches were entombed in the sky. Its peak, jealous of the eagle, out-towered him. About its stem, and through its haughty boughs a strange light played. It was neither the light of the sun nor yet the light of the moon. It was a false glare—a glare greatest about the region of decay. This tree was Ambition. Alas! for the pride and the haughty yearning of mortal men!
"In the healthy soil of a valley, on which the eye of a bright day seemed ever open, grew the fourth tree. Its branches neither towered haughtily nor stooped slavishly. Health was in every bough; and lo! the rainbow which had fallen from the sky of Despair had surely been imprisoned among its leaves. The wind fanned these leaves healthily and their transparent cups teinted by the sunlight—as red wines teint the fine vases of porcelain—were beautiful to behold. This tree was Peace. The moonlight of Love may grow dim; the sky of Despair is of ebony; the light of Ambition dies in the ashes of its fuel; but the sunlight of Peace is the light of an eye ever open. The head may be white and bowed down, but the threads of the angel-woven rainbow are wrapped about the heart of peaceful and holy Eld."
IV.
"The chiefest constituent of human beauty is the hair; after which in degree is to be ranked the eye; and lastly come the color and the texture of the skin. The varieties of these, cause it to happen that not unfrequently men differ in opinion as to what is comely and what is uncomely; this man maintaining black to be the better color for the hair as for the eye; that man maintaining a lighter color to be the better for both."—Burton.
Poets are generally persons of taste, and if we could find one of them certainly unbiassed by early recollections and the thousand trifles which warp taste, we might consider his judgment in regard to "the rival colors of the hair," as going far to exalt the color of his choice above its rivals. But the first of the modern philosophers loved squinting eyes because in his youth he had been in love with a little girl who squinted; and no taste is free from the influence of early recollections. Spenser's cousin, the lady who discarded him, "had hair of a flaxen hue." He ever after preferred this "hue," to all others. Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald was "of a stately person and gifted with pale glossy hair, with a sunny tinge about it." Lord Surrey sang of these "mixed ringlets" until the day of his death. I do not know that Ben. Jonson ever had a sweetheart, but he surely had a taste as good as if it had never been biassed by love for one. He speaks very well of—
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"Crisped hair Cast in a thousand snares and rings For love's fingers and his wings: Chesnut color or more slack Gold upon a ground of black." |
Leigh Hunt says that Lucrecia Borgia had hair "perfectly golden." Neither auburn nor red, but "perfectly golden." He has written some pretty verses upon a lock of this golden hair. He speaks of each thread as,
——"meandering in pellucid gold."
I forget the lines. This was the color beloved by a thousand poets; and one was found who forgot in contemplating the rare masses that, stained with it, lay upon the brow of Lucrecia Borgia, the "dark and unbridled passions" which led her to the bed of one brother and to the murder of another—and which have doomed her to "an immortality of evil repute."