“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.  I think I may safely say I never 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 costumes,—­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 Blumenthal Mountains.

Nothing can be more appropriate, more harmonious, than dancing on the green.  Youth and gayety 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 tree-tops.  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.

Yet I must confess I wish 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, the fluency of pliant forms, the willowy bend and rebound of lithe and lovely suppleness.  It is grace generic,—­the sublime, the evanescent mysticism 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 or may be free-thinkingly translated, “The Devil on Two Sticks.”  In saying this, I design to cast no slur on the moral character of masculine dancers.  It is unquestionably above reproach; but let an angel put on the black coat and trousers which constitute the “full-dress” of a modern gentleman, and therein antic through the “Lancers,” and he would simply be ridiculous,—­which