The Arts of Beauty/Chapter 2

Many women who can lay no claims to a beautiful face have carried captive the hearts of plenty of men by the beauty of their form. Indeed it may be questioned if a perfect form does not possess a power of captivation beyond any charms that the most beautiful face possesses. You will often hear men say of such and such a girl, "to be sure she has not a beautiful face, but then she has a most exquisite form;" and this they speak with such a peculiar earnestness that it is quite evident they mean what they say.

Those gloomy and ascetic beings who contemn the human body as only a cumbersome lump of clay, as a piece of corruption, and as the charnel-house of the soul, insult their maker, by despising the most ingenious and beautiful piece of mechanism of his physical creation. God has displayed so much care and love upon our bodies that He not only created them for usefulness, but he adorned them with loveliness. If it was not beneath our maker's glory to frame them in beauty, it certainly cannot be beneath us to respect and preserve the charms which we have received from his loving hand. To slight these gifts is to despise the ​giver. He that has made the temple of our souls beautiful, certainly would not have us neglect the means of preserving that beauty. Every woman owes it not only to herself, but to society, to be as beautiful and charming as she possibly can. The popular cant about the beauty of the mind as something which is inconsistent with, and in opposition to the beauty of the body, is a superstition which cannot be for a moment entertained by any sound and rational mind. To despise the temple is to insult its occupant. The divine intelligence which has planted the roses of beauty in the human cheeks, and lighted its fires in the eyes, has also intrusted us with a mission to multiply and increase these charms, as well as to develop and educate our intellects.

Let every woman feel, then, that so far from doing wrong, she is in the pleasant ways of duty when she is studying how to develop and preserve the natural beauty of her body.