Poets are generally persons of taste, and if we could find one of them certainly unbiassed by early recollections and the thousand trifles which warp taste, we might consider his judgment in regard to "the rival colors of the hair," as going far to exalt the color of his choice above its rivals. But the first of the modern philosophers loved squinting eyes because in his youth he had been in love with a little girl who squinted; and no taste is free from the influence of early recollections. Spenser's cousin, the lady who discarded him, "had hair of a flaxen hue." He ever after preferred this "hue," to all others. Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald was "of a stately person and gifted with pale glossy hair, with a sunny tinge about it." Lord Surrey sang of these "mixed ringlets" until the day of his death. I do not know that Ben. Jonson ever had a sweetheart, but he surely had a taste as good as if it had never been biassed by love for one. He speaks very well of-- "Crisped hair Cast in a thousand snares and rings For love's fingers and his wings: Chesnut color or more slack _Gold upon a ground of black_." Leigh Hunt says that Lucrecia Borgia had hair "perfectly golden." Neither auburn nor red, but "perfectly {316} golden." He has written some pretty verses upon a lock of this golden hair. He speaks of each thread as, ----"meandering in pellucid gold." I forget the lines. This was the color beloved by a thousand poets; and one was found who forgot in contemplating the rare masses that, stained with it, lay upon the brow of Lucrecia Borgia, the "dark and unbridled passions" which led her to the bed of one brother and to the murder of another--and which have doomed her to "an immortality of evil repute." Anacreon preferred auburn hair. "Deepening inwardly, a dun; Sparkling golden next the sun," conveys nearly the same idea with that expressed in Jonson's "Gold upon a ground of black." I have two or three more verses upon hair, which I recollect to have seen in an old English poem. They are descriptive of "Hero the _nun of Venus_--the lady beloved of Leander." These are the lines--three in number, "Come listen to the tale of Hero young, _Whom pale Apollo courted for her hair, And offered as a dower his burning throne_." We often meet with double tastes. Tasso loved two Leonoras. Leonora D'Este had a fair skin. The other was a brunette. "Bruna sei tu ma bella Qual virgini viola." It is difficult to decide between the rival colors of the eye. This difficulty is set forth in a little poem called the "Dilemma," which I find in an old number of the New England Magazine. "I had a vision in my dreams, I saw a row of twenty beams; From every beam a rope was hung, In every rope a lover swung. I asked the hue of every eye That bade each luckless lover die; Ten livid lips said heavenly blue And ten accused the darker hue."