troll dances his gruesome jig on lonely hills the gnome
executes his little pigeon wing in the obscure subterrene by the glimmer
of a diamond. Nature's untaught children dance in wood and glade,
stimulated of leg by the sunshine with which they are soaken top
full--the same quickening emanation that inspires the growing tree and
upheaves the hill. And, if I err not, there is sound Scripture for the
belief that these self same eminences have capacity to skip for joy. The
peasant dances--a trifle clumsily--at harvest feast when the grain is
garnered. The stars in heaven dance visibly, the firefly dances in
emulation of the stars. The sunshine dances on the waters. The humming
bird and the bee dance about the flowers which dance to the breeze. The
innocent lamb, type of the White Christ, dances on the green, and the
matronly cow perpetrates an occasional stiff enormity when she fancies
herself unobserved. All the sportive rollickings of all the animals,
from the agile fawn to the unwieldly behemoth are dances taught them by
nature.

I am not here making an argument for dancing, I only assert its
goodness, confessing its abuse. We do not argue the wholesomeness of
sunshine and cold water, we assert it, admitting that sunstroke is
mischievous and that copious potations of freezing water will founder a
superheated horse, and urge the hot blood to the head of an imprudent
man similarly prepared, killing him, as is right. We do not build
syllogisms to prove that grains and fruits of the earth are of God's
best bounty to man; we allow that bad whisky may--with difficulty--be
distilled from rye to spoil the toper's nose, and that hydrocyanic acid
can be got out of the bloomy peach. It were folly to prove that Science
and Invention are our very good friends, yet the sapper who has had the
misfortune to be blown to rags by the mine he was preparing for his
enemy will not deny that gunpowder has aptitudes of mischief; and from
the point of view of a nigger ordered upon the safety-valve of a racing
steamboat, the vapor of water is a thing accurst. Shall we condemn music
because the lute makes "lascivious pleasing?" Or poetry because some
amorous bard tells in warm rhyme the story of the passions, and
Swinburne has had the goodness to make vice offensive with his hymns in
its praise? Or sculpture because from the guiltless marble may be
wrought a drunken Silenus or a lechering satyr?--painting because the
untamed fancies of a painter