with the wise Harriet Martineau as to whether a certain dress should be
dyed to match a certain shawl? Well! why not? Because women learn the use
of the quill, are they to ignore "featherses "? Because they learn science,
must they unlearn the arts, and, above all, the art of being beautiful? If
men have lost it, they have reason to regret the loss. Let women hold to
it, while yet within their reach.

Mrs. Rachel Rowland of New Bedford, much prized and trusted as a public
speaker among Friends, and a model of taste and quiet beauty in costume,
delighted the young girls at a Newport Yearly Meeting, a few years since,
by boldly declaring that she thought God meant women to make the world
beautiful, as much as flowers and butterflies, and that there was no sin in
tasteful dress, but only in devoting to it too much money or too much time.
It is a blessed doctrine. The utmost extremes of dress, the love of colors,
of fabrics, of jewels, of "featherses," are, after all, but an effort after
the beautiful. The reason why the beautiful is not always the result is
because so many women are ignorant or merely imitative. They have no sense
of fitness: the short wear what belongs to the tall, and brunettes
sacrifice their natural beauty to look like blondes. Or they have no
adaptation; and even an emancipated woman may show a disregard for
appropriateness, as where a fine lady sweeps the streets, or a fair orator
the platform, with a silken or velvet train which accords only with a
carpet as luxurious as itself. What is inappropriate is never beautiful.
What is merely in the fashion is never beautiful. But who does not know
some woman whose taste and training are so perfect that fashion becomes to
her a means of grace instead of a despot, and the worst excrescence that
can be prescribed--a _chignon_, a hoop, a panier--is softened into
something so becoming that even the Parisian bondage seems but a chain of
roses?