sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of beauty, blazons the night with heaven's gems, and covers the earth with bright and living characters.
Beauty, as well as Truth, is eternal; but the beauty of material things passes away, fading and fleeting as mortal belief. Custom, education, and fashion form the transient standard of mortal beauty. Immortality, exempt from age or decay, has a beauty of its own, belonging to Spirit. Immortal man and woman are the models of spiritual sense, pictures of the Mind that is perfect, reflecting those higher conceptions of loveliness that exceed all material sense of loveliness.
To have less illusion and more Soul, is the recipe for beauty. To retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body, into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of impersonal bliss, is not to lose one's identity. The embellishments of the person are poor substitutes for the beauty of Spirit, shining resplendent and eternal over age and decay.
The measurement of Life, by solar years, robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The rising sun of virtue and Truth marks the morning of being. Its manhood is the eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun. When a personal and material sense of beauty fades, the radiance of Spirit should dawn upon the enraptured sense with brighter glories.
Love never loses sight of beauty. Its halo rests upon its object. One marvels that a friend can ever seem less than beautiful. Man and woman, of riper years and larger lessons, are growing in beauty and immortality, in stead of lapsing into age and ugliness. Mind constantly feeds the body with supernal freshness and fairness,
