around them. Trees have whispered to them, flowers have looked up
and rebuked them, brooks have called to them with laughter, rivers
have smiled upon them in sunshine, the great sky has bent over
them with infinite tenderness and fulness of beauty, and they have
felt what they could not define. It was something very wrong, they
supposed, and so they buttoned their straight jackets around them,
turned their eyes away from beholding vanity, and thought they had
done an excellent thing. I know that those young women, with their
abominable clothing outside, and their crushed and abused
sympathies inside, are unhappy, unless they have all been
mercifully transformed into fanatics. It is useless to tell me
that a man can ignore or trample to death the strongest passion of
his nature--the strongest, the purest, and the most ennobling--and
be a happy man. It is useless to say that a man or woman can walk
through a world of beauty--themselves the most beautiful of all
things--and bind themselves up in unbecoming drapery, and smother
all their impulses to express the beauty with which God inspires
them, and do it with content and satisfaction. It cannot be done.

So, when this wagon-load of Shakers drove out of sight, I heaved a
sigh, for I knew that not to be unhappy in the life which was
typefied in their dress and establishment, would be a greater
misfortune, essentially, than dissatisfaction and discontent would
be. If they were happy in their life, they must have become
perverted in their natures, or indurated beyond the susceptibility
to receive the impressions of healthy men and women. If God ever
put any thing majestic and noble into a man, and gave him a
fitting frame for it, He never intended that it should be hidden
in a meal-bag, or permanently quenched under a smock-frock. In the
infinite variety which he has introduced into human character and