REMEMBRANCE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 220, 7 November 1874, Page 2

REMEMBRANCE.

There’s not a word thy lip hath breathed, A look thine eye hath given, That is not shrined within my heart, Like to a dream of Heaven.

There’s not a spot where wo have met, A favorite flower or tree, There's not a scene by thee beloved, That is not prized by mo.

Whene’er I catch tho breath of flowers, Or music from the tree, Thought wings her way to distant bowers, And memory clings to thee.

WHERE FEMALE FASHIONS COME FROM.

A Lady Correspondent says:—“The striking features of the prevailing fashions are —the compression of the heart, lungs, and liver ; compression of the feet and tipping of the heels ; dyed, burned, and crimped hair; freckle erasures, balms, rouge, eyebrow dark, lip carminater, and nail pink, earrings; bclladona to brighten the eyes, and arsenic , slate-pencilsand pie to whiten the face ; a hump on the back; fans, like daggers, umbrellas like shilellahs, and knapsacks laboriously buckled around the waisted place called the waist; hair clipped on the forehead ; floating hair, the less brains inside of the head the more hair bought for the outside of it; all the ornaments possible to be gotten upon the head, hands and neck. Fiji belles dye their hair blonde, and the calves of their legs are three time as thick as an Englishman's. They’ vary the hue of their hair to bright red sometimes, and infuse the picturesque into the coiffure by means of variegated wigs. It is to be regretted that these stylish women are treacherous, cruel, and climb a. tree on all-fours. The Georgians, just south of the declivity of the Caucasus, distinguished chiefly for their marketable qualities, cut. their hair across the forehead, and frizz it. The lower class of women in Peru have a similiar custom. The Burmese women curl their hair by very trying methods. The chief beauty is the flatness of their forehead ; and if Nature unwittingly made the Burmese women’s forehead upright, the defect is corrected by pressing the frontal bones in leaden plates. For our fashionable girls to elevate the steel corslet that compresses their vital organs, and use it for the purpose of compressing and flattening their foreheads, it would bo an improvement. The lungs and heart would still be relieved, and their brains would not suffer grievous injury. The water-fall and chignon are borrowed from the lower order of women in Japan, who have always had a weakness for them. The tight lacing appears to have been borrowed from the Circassians. Their waists are bound‘in leathern bells from the hour of their birth until they are married.’ The Circassian beauty, however, proves retrogression in ornamental arlifice ; for no real belle of the tribe ever uses cosmetics. Their chief moral characteristic, co-equal with their beauty, is adroit knavery. They are Sparlans in theft. Each steals all she can from her neighbor. The crops are guarded by armed men. The floating hair is the fashion of Bouemia, which may account for the favor the stylo finds among literary women. The women of Bohemia are simple in their lives, and live in an advanced age. The hump on the back is not a proof of evolution, but is a recurrence—as Agassiz would say—a recurrence to the type of the camel. There seems to be absolutely no progression in cosmetics. The Kamsehatkan hag performs her natural toilet by smearing her face with red aud white as soon as she emerges from her hovel. It was undoubtedly from a contemplation

of her in a foreign fashi< n plate the bard arose to rem irk that beauty when unadorned is adorned the most. It is the Greek girl, unfit for honorable use .in life, who traces faint blue lines under her eyelid to indicate physical fragility, as if it were not apparent enough. The Arab women darken their eyebrows and eyelashes, but always tint them blue for full dress and Sundays. They swear more successfully than our army in Flanders. The Bedouins dismount long enough to paint their armies. The earring barbarism is ancient, anl a survival of the unfirtest; therefore a type preserved. Tiie Burmese women, the most licentious of Asia, drape their bosoms with gauze. Retrogression again; civilised women throw the gauze off. The prevailing fashions have preserved everything ridiculous aesthetically, injurious and enfeebling physically, and vicious morally. The Greeks and Circassians, who are the weakest and the most artificial women, are the most inane and degraded. A generation, or a nation of men and women, physically weak, can never be intellectually strong. The inequality that survives between the American meu and women is directly or indirectly physical, and its immediate causes are fashions in dress, and fashionable usages in society.