Yet, in a far inferior way, every man is a poet to himself. In the microcosm of his own small round, every one has the power to vivify old incident, every one raises bawbles of the desk and drawer, not only into life, but into life they never had. With the flower whose leaves are shed about the box, we can bring back the brilliant morning of its blossoming, desire and hope and joyous youth once more; with the letter laid away beside it rises the dear hand that rested on the sheet, and moved along the leaf with every line it penned: each trinket has its pretty past, pleasant or painful to recall as it may be. There is no trifle, however vulgar, but, looking at its previous page, it has a side in the ideal. When one at the theatre saw so many ringlets arranged as "waterfalls," he laughed and said, they undoubtedly belonged to the "dead-heads." But Belinda, who wears a waterfall, and at night puts it into a box, considers the remark a profanity, and confesses that she never adorns herself with this addition but she thinks of that girl in France who cherished her long locks, and combed them out with care until her marriage-day, when she put on a fair white cap, and sold them for her dowry. There are more poetic locks of hair, it must be said;--the keepsake of two lovers; the lock of Keats's hair, too sacred to touch, lying in its precious salvatory. But that is the ideal of the past belonging to Belinda's waterfall, a trivial, common thing enough, yet one that has a right to its ideal, nevertheless, if we accept the ecstasies of a noted writer upon its magic material. "In spinning and weaving," says he, "the ideal that we pursue is the hair of a woman. How far are the softest wools, the finest cottons, from reaching it! At what an enormous distance from this hair all our progress leaves us, and will forever leave us! We drag behind and watch with envy this supreme perfection that every day Nature realizes in her play. This hair, fine, strong, resistant, vibrant in light sonority, and, with all that, soft, warm, luminous, and electric,--it is the flower of the human flower. There are idle disputes concerning the merit of its color. What matter? The lustrous black contains and promises the flame. The blond displays it with the splendors of the Fleece of Gold. The brown, chatoyant in the sun, appropriates the sun itself, mingles it with its mirages, floats, undulates, varies ceaselessly in its brook-like reflections, by moments smiles in the light or glooms in the shade, deceives always, and, whatever you say of it, gives you the lie charmingly.--The chief effort of human industry has combined all methods in order to exalt cotton. Rare accord of capital, machinery, arts of design, and finally chemical science, has produced those beautiful results to which England herself renders homage in buying them. Alas! all that cannot disguise the original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which has been so much adorned.