Chapter IV

"The chiefest constituent of human beauty is the hair; after which in degree is to be ranked the eye; and lastly come the color and the texture of the skin. The varieties of these, cause it to happen that not unfrequently men differ in opinion as to what is comely and what is uncomely; this man maintaining black to be the better color for the hair as for the eye; that man maintaining a lighter color to be the better for both."--_Burton_.

Poets are generally persons of taste, and if we could find one of them certainly unbiassed by early recollections and the thousand trifles which warp taste, we might consider his judgment in regard to "the rival colors of the hair," as going far to exalt the color of his choice above its rivals. But the first of the modern philosophers loved squinting eyes because in his youth he had been in love with a little girl who squinted; and no taste is free from the influence of early recollections. Spenser's cousin, the lady who discarded him, "had hair of a flaxen hue." He ever after preferred this "hue," to all others. Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald was "of a stately person and gifted with pale glossy hair, with a sunny tinge about it." Lord Surrey sang of these "mixed ringlets" until the day of his death. I do not know that Ben. Jonson ever had a sweetheart, but he surely had a taste as good as if it had never been biassed by love for one. He speaks very well of--

"Crisped hair
Cast in a thousand snares and rings
For love's fingers and his wings:
Chesnut color or more slack
_Gold upon a ground of black_."

Leigh Hunt says that Lucrecia Borgia had hair "perfectly golden." Neither auburn nor red, but "perfectly {316} golden." He has written some pretty verses upon a lock of this golden hair. He speaks of each thread as,

----"meandering in pellucid gold."

I forget the lines. This was the color beloved by a thousand poets; and one was found who forgot in contemplating the rare masses that, stained with it, lay upon the brow of Lucrecia Borgia, the "dark and unbridled passions" which led her to the bed of one brother and to the murder of another--and which have doomed her to "an immortality of evil repute."

Anacreon preferred auburn hair.

"Deepening inwardly, a dun;
Sparkling golden next the sun,"

conveys nearly the same idea with that expressed in Jonson's "Gold upon a ground of black."

I have two or three more verses upon hair, which I recollect to have seen in an old English poem. They are descriptive of "Hero the _nun of Venus_--the lady beloved of Leander." These are the lines--three in number,

"Come listen to the tale of Hero young,
_Whom pale Apollo courted for her hair,
And offered as a dower his burning throne_."

We often meet with double tastes. Tasso loved two Leonoras. Leonora D'Este had a fair skin. The other was a brunette.

"Bruna sei tu ma bella
Qual virgini viola."

It is difficult to decide between the rival colors of the eye. This difficulty is set forth in a little poem called the "Dilemma," which I find in an old number of the New England Magazine.

"I had a vision in my dreams,
I saw a row of twenty beams;
From every beam a rope was hung,
In every rope a lover swung.
I asked the hue of every eye
That bade each luckless lover die;
Ten livid lips said heavenly blue
And ten accused the darker hue."

Before ending this "scrap" I will quote some sentences written by a friend of my own long ago--a very eccentric man, and indeed a melancholy one. He had been crossed in love, and could rarely speak or write without recurring to the origin of his unhappiness. He had a great many faults, but he is dead now, and has been so for many years; I am not anxious to say any more about them. The paragraph which I copy from his manuscript, is a portion of a flighty book, the aim or meaning of which I could never discover. It owes its fanciful extravagance, I rather think, to the influence of opium upon the author's nerves. After pointing out the numerous particulars in which "nature imitates our women," he proceeds to observe after the following fashion,

"In the hair, nature is most an imitator. The cascade caressing the precipice with the threads of its silver locks, which the teeth of the granite comb have frizled, and which the winds play at gambol with, is only a copy. So with the vine on the rock--the great vine whose metallic tendrils I have looked on and wondered at when the sunshine spanned them with a cloven halo. So with the drooping moss--the _Barba Espagna_, with its drapery of gold held by threads of spun alabaster, hanging in _hard_ festoons from the tree beside the Lagoon and sighing when its hues die with the sunlight. And so with the boughs of our weeping trees. O, but are not these last most beautiful? Place your ear to the soft grass-blades on the brink of a valley brook, and listen to the monotone of the willow's stirred ringlets, and watch them as the wind lifts them from the eddy beneath to float, bejewelled by adhering globules. And then look upon them as with the abating wind they sink lower and lower, leaving their cool rain upon your cheek. See them trail in the pebbly waters and conjure up in each detached leaf an Elfin barque laden with its rare boatmen and tiny beauties. Hear the tinkle of the little bells and the shrieks of the wrecked mariners, as they cling to the hair of the willow (as Zal clung to the locks of his mistress) and splash the brook into foam. And now they leap to the backs of their skipper steeds, and ply the spur of the thistle seed, and gallop off for the green shore, wringing their hands and bewailing the ill fate of their holiday trim. Such marvellous fancies, if you are fanciful, will prick your brain until the drowsy sough of the tree-hair and the renewed trickle of the raining spray lend your eyes sleep and call forth the dream spirit, as the fly from its cocoon, and give it the wings of wilder vagary to flutter away withal--whither? _Mine_ would return to my wanderings by Goluon with her whose tomb in the valley of sweet waters often pillows my head."

Alas for my poor friend Bob! He died of a broken heart--that is to say _mediately_. He died _im_-mediately of hard drinking. Napoleon remembered the Seine on his death-bed and asked to be buried upon its sunniest bank; Bob remembered Goluon when his great temples had the death-damp upon them. His vision had failed him; his nose had become peaked; his body, like a jaded and worn hack, had fallen under the spirit, which like a stout horseman had long kept it to its paces; but the little abiding place of memory had not been destroyed, and poor Bob muttered at times of a dead lady with fair hair--of a valley of sweet waters--of a grave with two willows above it--of pleasant Goluon--and died with an unuttered prayer upon his lips, and with a strong desire at his heart. The prayer was, that I, his friend, would bury him between the two willows--on the evening bank of Goluon--side by side with Betty Manning his old sweetheart. Poor Bob! May God take kind care of his soul!