Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/172

 but seek happiness at the home-hearth; that alone is real. Ambition is well to dream about, but at last it is a barren tree. Wife, love, home, children, — these are wealth only worth the having!

Let us take another practical view of the great subject. Beauty is confessedly of paramount importance to every man; and infinitely more so to every woman. Beauty, aided by art, is woman's weapon against the heart of man. It_i_s a_divine gift, and can be cultured as well as any other quality of human kind. True, we cannot change features or faces — although we can alter forms and figures; yet we do, by art, improve upon nature, and every real woman is, by her very soul and sex, bound to do so. And in the first place there is nothing that so heightens the charms of a lady, like a clear, pure, pimpleless, translucent skin, which can neither be had, or retained, unless the stomach and blood, the lymph and bile are right, in themselves considered. ... Of all emotions experienced by the human being, not one has so terrible a_disfiguring effect upon the features as that of anger., for it defaces beauty worse, and more effectually than the small-pox! Indeed, anger is now understood, in scientific circles, to be no more or less than a form of insanity, and we begin to pity an angry person just as we do one who is known to be crazy in other respects. In "Putnam's Magazine" is an interesting article by George M. Beard, M. D., on the subject, "Who are the Insane?" in which he contends that ungovernable attacks of passion, violent temper, and unnatural cruelty, are the results of insanity far more frequently than will probably be admitted by those who have not given this subject close and special attention. Their disease has its exacerbations, its paroxysms of attack, and during the intervals, their bearing may be entirely courteous, and their whole disposition sweet and tender. He adds: —

"Howard, the philanthropist, who crossed seas and mountains to relieve the distressed, was a brute and tyrant in his own family. Dr. Winslow says of him, 'His cruel treatment caused the death of his wife. He was in the habit for many years of doing penance before her picture. He had an only son, whom, for the slightest offence, he punished with terrible severity, making him stand for hours in a grotto in the garden. The son became a