I heaved a sigh as the wagon-load of mortified and badly-dressed flesh passed out of sight, and wondered if the souls inside of those bodies were as angular as their covering. I did not believe it--I do not believe it. I have no doubt that underneath those straight waistcoats hearts have throbbed at the sight of woman and child, and longed for home and family life, with yearnings that could not be uttered. Those straightlaced sensibilities have been thrilled by beauty, and bathed in the grace and glory of the life around them. Trees have whispered to them, flowers have looked up and rebuked them, brooks have called to them with laughter, rivers have smiled upon them in sunshine, the great sky has bent over them with infinite tenderness and fulness of beauty, and they have felt what they could not define. It was something very wrong, they supposed, and so they buttoned their straight jackets around them, turned their eyes away from beholding vanity, and thought they had done an excellent thing. I know that those young women, with their abominable clothing outside, and their crushed and abused sympathies inside, are unhappy, unless they have all been mercifully transformed into fanatics. It is useless to tell me that a man can ignore or trample to death the strongest passion of his nature--the strongest, the purest, and the most ennobling--and be a happy man. It is useless to say that a man or woman can walk through a world of beauty--themselves the most beautiful of all things--and bind themselves up in unbecoming drapery, and smother all their impulses to express the beauty with which God inspires them, and do it with content and satisfaction. It cannot be done. So, when this wagon-load of Shakers drove out of sight, I heaved a sigh, for I knew that not to be unhappy in the life which was typefied in their dress and establishment, would be a greater misfortune, essentially, than dissatisfaction and discontent would be. If they were happy in their life, they must have become perverted in their natures, or indurated beyond the susceptibility to receive the impressions of healthy men and women. If God ever put any thing majestic and noble into a man, and gave him a fitting frame for it, He never intended that it should be hidden in a meal-bag, or permanently quenched under a smock-frock. In the infinite variety which he has introduced into human character and into human forms and faces, there is no warrant for dressing men in uniform, but a most emphatic protest against it. If God made woman beautiful, He made her so to be looked at--to give pleasure to the eyes which rest upon her--and she has no business to dress herself as if she were a hitching-post, or to transform that which should give delight to those among whom she moves, into a ludicrous caricature of a woman's form.