When the feasting was over, the most picturesque part of the day began. The College green put off suddenly its antique gravity, and became "Embrouded ..... as it were a mede Alle ful of fresshe floures, white and rede,""floures" which to their gay hues and graceful outlines added the rare charm of fluttering in perpetual motion. It was a kaleidoscope without angles. To me, niched in the embrasure of an old upper window, the scene, it seemed, might have stepped out of the Oriental splendor of Arabian Nights. Inever saw so many well-dressed people together in my life before. That seems a rather tame fact to buttress Arabian Nights withal, but it implies much. The distance was a little too great for one to note personal and individual beauty; but since I have heard that Boston is famous for its ugly women, perhaps that was an advantage, as diminishing likewise individual ugliness. If no one was strikingly handsome, no one was strikingly plain. And though you could not mark the delicacies of faces, you could have the full effect of costume,--rich, majestic, floating, 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 shrewd sense and mother-wit in his brains, and a fine, indirect way of hitting the nail on the head with a side-stroke, was questioned in a neighboring village as to the facts of the case. "Yes," he said, surlily, "the young folks had a party, and got up a dance, and the minister was mad,--and I don't blame him,--he thinks nobody has any business to dance, unless he knows how better than they did!" It was a rather different casus belli from that which the worthy clergyman would have preferred before a council; but it "meets my views"precisely as to the validity of the objections urged against dancing. I would have women dance, and women only, because it is the most beautiful thing in the world. And I think my views are Scriptural, for I find that it was the VIRGINS of Israel that were to go forth in the dances of them that make merry.
It was the DAUGHTERS of Shiloh that went out to dance in dances at the feast of the Lord on the south of Lebonah.
From my window overlooking the green, I was led away into some one or other of the several halls to see the "round dances";and it was like going from Paradise to Pandemonium. From the pure and healthy lawn, all the purer for the pure and peaceful people pleasantly walking up and down in the sunshine and shade, or grouped in the numerous windows, like bouquets of rare tropical flowers,--from the green, rainbowed in vivid splendor, and alive with soft, tranquil motion, fair forms, and the flutter of beautiful and brilliant colors,--from the green, sanctified already by the pale faces of sick, and wounded, and maimed soldiers who had gone out from the shadows of those sheltering trees to draw the sword for country, and returned white wraiths of their vigorous youth, the sad vanguard of that great army of blessed martyrs who shall keep forever in the mind of this generation how costly and precious a thing is liberty, who shall lift our worldly age out of the slough of its material prosperity in to the sublimity of suffering and sacrifice,--from suggestions, and fancies, and dreamy musing, and "phantasms sweet," into the hall, where, for flower-scented summer air were thick clouds of fine, penetrating dust; and for lightly trooping fairies, a jam of heated human beings, so that you shall hardly come nigh the dancers for the press; and when you have, with difficulty, and many contortions, and much apologizing, threaded the solid mass, piercing through the forest of fans,--what? An enclosure, but no more illusion.
