gossamery, impalpable. Everything
was fresh, spotless, and in tune. It scarcely needed music to resolve
all the incessant waver and shimmer into a dance; but the music came,
and, like sand-grains under the magnet, the beautiful atoms swept into
stately shapes and tremulous measured activity,--

"A fine, sweet earthquake gently moved
By the soft wind of whispering silks."

Then it seemed like a German festival, and came back to me the
Fatherland, the lovely season of the Blossoming, the short, sweet
bliss-month among the Blumenbuhl Mountains.

Nothing call be more appropriate, more harmonious, than dancing on the
green. Youth, and gaiety, and beauty--and in summer we are all young,
and gay, and beautiful--mingle well with the eternal youth of blue sky,
and velvet sward, and the light breezes toying in the treetops. Youth
and Nature kiss each other in the bright, clear purity of the happy
summer-tide. Whatever objections lie against dancing elsewhere must
veil their faces there.

If only men would not dance! It is the most unbecoming exercise which
they can adopt. In women you have the sweep and wave of drapery,
gentle undulations, summer-cloud floatings, soft, sinuous movements,
fluency of pliant forms, the willowy bend and rebound of lithe and
lovely suppleness. It is grace generic,--the sublime, the evanescent
mysticisin of motion, without use, without aim, except its own
overflowing and all-sufficing fascination. But when a man dances, it
reminds me of that amusing French book called "Le Diable Boiteux,"
which has been free-thinkingly translated, "The Devil on Two Sticks."
A woman's dancing is gliding, swaying, serpentine. A man's is jerks,
hops, convulsions, and acute angles. The woman is light, airy,
indistinctly defined. Airy movements are in keeping. The man is
sombre in hue, grave in tone, distinctly outlined; and nothing is more
incongruous, to my thinking, than his dancing. The feminine drapery
conceals processes and gives results. The masculine absence of drapery
reveals processes, and thereby destroys results.

Once upon a time, long before the Flood, the clergyman of a
country-village, possessed with such a zeal as Paul bore record of
concerning Israel, conceived it his duty to "make a note" of sundry
young members of his flock who had met for a drive and a supper, with a
dance fringed upon the outskirts. The fame whereof being noised
abroad, a sturdy old farmer, with a good deal of