f expression with the light of a
purer and a better world. The charm--most gently and yet most
distinctly expressed--which they shed over the whole face, so covers
and transforms its little natural human blemishes elsewhere, that it is
difficult to estimate the relative merits and defects of the other
features. It is hard to see that the lower part of the face is too
delicately refined away towards the chin to be in full and fair
proportion with the upper part; that the nose, in escaping the aquiline
bend (always hard and cruel in a woman, no matter how abstractedly
perfect it may be), has erred a little in the other extreme, and has
missed the ideal straightness of line; and that the sweet, sensitive
lips are subject to a slight nervous contraction, when she smiles,
which draws them upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It
might be possible to note these blemishes in another woman's face but
it is not easy to dwell on them in hers, so subtly are they connected
with all that is individual and characteristic in her expression, and
so closely does the expression depend for its full play and life, in
every other feature, on the moving impulse of the eyes.

Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient labour of long and happy
days, show me these things? Ah, how few of them are in the dim
mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind with which I regard it! A
fair, delicate girl, in a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves
of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent
blue eyes--that is all the drawing can say; all, perhaps, that even the
deeper reach of thought and pen can say in their language, either. The
woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions
of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained
unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for
words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by
other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources
of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of
women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has
claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. Then, and
then only, has it passed beyond the narrow region on which light falls,
in this world, from the pencil and the pen.

Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses
within you that the rest of her sex had no art