is all I allege against Thomas, Richard, and Henry, Esq.  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 this dancing, well portrayed in the contraband melody of

    “Old Joe,” etc.

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 thereof 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, because it is the most beautiful thing in the world.  I would have men dance, if it is necessary, in order to “set off” women, and to keep themselves out of mischief; but in point of grace, or elegance, or attractiveness, I should beg men to hold their peace—­and their pumps.

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 plough of its material prosperity into 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 inclosure, but no more illusion.