Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/19

 fashion to decry it, to affect to hold it lightly, to pass it by as transitory and superficial. That it is fleeting is true, and more the pity, more the reason that we should guard it well, and appreciate it while it lasts. For it is this beauty, "skin-deep" if you will, that inspired the pencil of Raphael and the chisel of Michael Angelo. It is this which renders the works of the great masters of art immortal, which invests their productions with a sweet and mighty influence, which gives them a value beyond what dollars and cents can possibly express.

Plato, profoundest of heathen philosophers, exploring this universe in search of God, whom as yet no revelation had disclosed to the Gentile world, found Him nowhere so manifestly present as in Beauty, and with this as his last word the thinker returned to earth.

Trivial philosophizers of modern times have been unable to make anything out of this. With dry erudition they would show us that this matter of personal beauty is a mere caprice of the fancy; that in Abyssinia the ideal woman is a mass of fat, a Dulcinea of four hundred weight or so, while in China she must be as lank and lean as the brown sea-sand; that the Caffirs delight in a black skin, thick lips, a flat nose, and large flabby ears; that the Peruvians aim to acquire a distorted head and prominent cheek bones; and many similar diversities of taste. From all this