Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/318

 dust-catchers, which wise Nature has hung at the entrance to these cavities.

THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE HAIR.

"The arrangement of the hair! Why, that is matter for a barber, or a dressing-maid. We leave it to them, and to the fashion-plate makers."

The worse for you if you do, for it is simply throwing away one of the most potent means of enhancing the natural charms. The ancients, passionate lovers of beauty, with souls ever sensitive of its sweet concords, did not so. They thought it no derogation to bestow on the disposition of the locks thought and study. Neither do we.

The symbol-loving minds of the Greeks saw in the various modes of wearing the hair the expression of different temperaments, and ever strove to adopt that which was at once in the most perfect harmony with the features, and with the character of the individuals. Let us try to obtain, if we can, some small share of their artistic power, some partial insight into that wondrous world of beauty which they saw surrounding the daily life of this work-a-day world, where we, alas, see little but hard facts and homely fancies. How much will be our gain if we learn to see the beautiful, not only in galleries of statuary and paintings, but in the forms of daily life!

Perhaps, after all, we have more of this insight than