XXVII. 



BEAUTY. 



Beauty, says the old saw, is but skin-deep; 

 yet the proverb itself, as a great philosopher has 

 justly remarked, is, after all, but a skin-deep 

 proverb. To be sure, there is a sense in which 

 beauty lies on the very surface of a liuman face ; 

 take the most lovely woman in America, and let a 

 skin-disease ruin her complexion, and you reduce 

 her at once, if not to ugliness, at least to compara- 

 tive uncomeliness in the undiscerning eyes of 

 almost half humanity. Yet there is a profounder 

 and truer sense in which beauty is anything but 

 skin-deep; for, though injury to the skin may 

 conceal or alter it, a great deal more than such 

 mere external characteristics is involved in mak- 

 ing a man handsome or a woman beautiful. In 

 the very deepest sense of all it would be far more 

 correct to say that beauty depends upon the high- 

 est conformity to the ideal of our race, alike in 

 physical, intellectual, and moral qualities. Our 

 love for human beauty is in the last resort a love 

 for all that is healthy, noble, and admirable in the 

 human mind and in the human body. This view, 



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