together the folds of her cumbrous feridjee. I was standing in the
gangway, watching her, when a slight lurch of the steamer caused her to
loose her hold of the garment, which, fastened at the neck, was blown back
from her shoulders, leaving her body screened but by a single robe
of-light, gauzy silk. Through this, the marble whiteness of her skin, the
roundness, the glorious symmetry of her form, flashed upon me, as a vision
of Aphrodite, seen

"Through leagues of shimmering water, like a star."

It was but a momentary glimpse; yet that moment convinced me that forms
of Phidian perfection are still nurtured in the vales of Caucasus.

The necessary disguise of dress hides from us much of the beauty and
dignity of Humanity, I have seen men who appeared heroic in the freedom of
nakedness, shrink almost into absolute vulgarity, when clothed. The soul
not only sits at the windows of the eyes, and hangs upon the gateway of
the lips; she speaks as well in the intricate, yet harmonious lines of the
body, and the ever-varying play of the limbs. Look at the torso of
Ilioneus, the son of Niobe, and see what an agony of terror and
supplication cries out from that headless and limbless trunk! Decapitate
Laocoön, and his knotted muscles will still express the same dreadful
suffering and resistance. None knew this better than the ancient
sculptors; and hence it was that we find many of their statues of
distinguished men wholly or partly undraped. Such a view of Art would be
considered transcendental now-a-days, when our dress, our costumes, and
our modes of speech either ignore the existence of our bodies, or treat
them with little of that reverence which is their due.

But, while we have been thinking these thoughts, the attendant has been