Hair is to the human aspect what foliage is to the landscape; and, whenever pen or pencil is guided by poetic feeling or good taste, it lingers with admiration and delight amid the shadows and glossy silken sheen--the ever-varying tints, and waving, wanton loveliness of sunny, luxuriant hair. Indeed, so beautiful is the hair itself, when arranged with taste, and kept in good order, (that is in a growing, healthful state,) that the addition of any further ornament, by way of head-dress, is all but superfluous. Not that all ornament should be dispensed with, but that great judgment is necessary in selecting such as correct taste may approve. Addison, with his usual good sense, thus counsels his fair readers: “I would desire the fair sex to consider how impossible it is for them to add anything that can be ornamental to what is already the masterpiece of nature. The head has the most beautiful appearance, as well as the highest station, in the human figure. Nature has laid out all her art in beautifying the face; she has touched it with vermilion, planted in it a double row of ivory, made it the seat of smiles and blushes, lightened it up and enlivened it with the eyes, hung it on each side with curious organs of sense, given it airs and graces which cannot be described, and surrounded it with such a flowing shade of hair as sets its beauties in the most agreeable light. In short, she seems to have designed the head as a cupola to the most glorious of her works; and when we load it with such a pile of supernumerary ornaments, we destroy the symmetry of the human figure, and foolishly contrive to call off the eye from great and real beauties to childish gew-gaws, ribbons, and bone lace.” And beautiful exceedingly are those beloved memorials--the silken locks of childhood, the treasured tresses of riper years, or the silver gray of reverend old age--which, in the eyes of sorrowing friends, are the dearest relics of the loved ones whose angel spirits beyond the tomb have passed through death into eternity. “There seems a love in hair, though it be dead: It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread Of our frail plant--a blossom from the tree Surviving the proud trunk; as if it said, Patience and Gentleness in Power. In me Behold affectionate eternity.” _Leigh Hunt._ THE FASHION OF ANTIQUITY. CHAPTER II.