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common pictures. He was the least _ad captandum_ of workers. He avoided bright eyes, curls, and contours, glancing lights, strong contrasts, and colors too crude for harmony. He reduced his beauty to her elements, so that an inner beauty might play through her features. Like the Catholic discipline which pales the face of the novice with vigils, seclusion, and fasting, and thus makes room and clears the way for the movements of the spirit, so in these figures every vulgar grace is suppressed. No classic contours, no languishing attitudes, no asking for admiration,--but a severe and chaste restraint, a modest sweetness, a slumbering intellectual atmosphere, a graceful self-possession, eyes so sincere and pure that heaven's light shines through them, and, beyond all, a hovering spiritual life that makes each form a presence. Perhaps the two most remarkable and original of the pieces I have named above are the "Beatrice" and the "Rosalie." Of the "Beatrice" there has been much discussion whether she could have been intended to represent the Beatrice of Dante. To me it appears that there is nothing like that world- and heaven-renowned lady in this our Beatrice. She sits alone: one sees that in the expression of her eyes. Her dress is of almost conventual simplicity; the colors rich, but sober; the style flowing and mediaeval. She has soft brown hair; soft, velvet-soft, brown eyes; features not salient, but rounded into the contours of the head; her whole expression receptive, yet radiant with sentiment. The complexion of a tender rose, equally diffused, gives an indescribable air of healthful delicacy to the face. The expression of the whole figure is that of one in a very dream of sentiment. Her twilight eyes see without effort into the very soul of things, as other eyes look at their surfaces. The sentiment of this figure is so powerful that by its gentle charm it fastens the beholder, who gazes and cannot withdraw his eyes, wondering what is the spell that can so hold him to that face, which is hardly beautiful, surely without surface beauty. I once heard a person who was unaccustomed to the use of critical terms say of these creations of Allston, "Here is beauty, but not the beauty that glares on you"; and this phrase, so odd, but so original, well describes the beauty of this Beatrice, who, though now transfigured by sentiment and capable of being a home-goddess, does not seem intended to shine in starry circles. B
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