There is a fact well known to physicians, which settles at once the importance of fresh air to beauty, as well as health. It is, that in proportion as people stay at home, and do not set their lungs playing as they ought, the blood becomes dark, and lags in its current; whereas the habit of inhaling the air out of doors reddens it like a ruby, and makes it clear and brisk. Now the darker the blood, the more melancholy the sensations, and the worse the complexion.
It is common with persons who inherit a good stock of health from their ancestors, to argue that they take no particular pains to preserve it, and yet are well. This may be true; and it is also true, that there is a painstaking to that effect, which is superfluous and morbid, and helps to do more harm than good. But it does not follow from either of these truths, that a neglect of the rational means of retaining health will ultimately be good for any body. Healthy people may live a good while upon their stock. Children are in the habit of doing it. But healthy children, especially those who are foolishly treated upon an assumption that health consists in being highly fed, and having great beef-eating cheeks, very often turn out sickly at last; and grown-up people, for the most part, at least in great towns, have as little really good health, as children in general are given credit for the reverse. Nature does indeed provide liberally for abuses; but the abuse will be felt at last. It is generally felt a long while before it is acknowledged. Then comes age, with all its train of regrets and superstitions; and the beauty and the man, besides a world perhaps of idle remorse, which they would not feel but for their perverted blood, could eat their hearts out for having been such fools as not to secure a continuance of good looks and manly feelings, for want of a little handsome energy.
The ill taste of existence that is so apt to come upon people in middle life, is too often attributed to moral causes. Moral they are, but very often not in the sense imagined. Whatever causes be mixed up with them, the greatest of all is, in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, no better or grander than a non-performance of the common duties of health. Many a fine lady takes a surfeit for a tender distress; and many a real sufferer, who is haunted by a regret, or takes himself for the most ill-used of bilious old gentlemen, might trace the loftiest of his woes to no better origin than a series of ham-pies, or a want of proper use of his boots and umbrella.[52]
[52] New Monthly Magazine.
A SONG.
Young Joe, he was a carman gay,
As any town could show;
His team was good, and, like his pence,
Was always on the go;
A thing, as every jackass knows,
Which often leads to wo!
It fell out that he fell in love,
By some odd chance or whim,
With Alice Payne—beside whose eyes
All other eyes were dim:
The painful tale must out—indeed,
She was A Pain to him.
For, when he ask’d her civilly
To make one of they two,
She whipp’d her tongue across her teeth,
And said, “D’ye think it true,
I’d trust my load of life with sich
A waggoner as you?