pt the colour. Mere
brightness the eyeball has or has not, but so have many glass beads: the
liveliness is the eyelid's. "Dr Harvey told me it was like the eie of a
viper." So intent and narrowed must have been the attitude of Bacon's
eyelids.

"I never saw such another eye in a human, head," says Scott in describing
Burns, "though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time. It was
large, and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he
spoke with feeling or interest. The eye alone, I think, indicated the
poetical character and temperament." No eye literally glows; but some
eyes are polished a little more, and reflect. And this is the utmost
that can possibly have been true as to the eyes of Burns. But set within
the meanings of impetuous eyelids the lucidity of the dark eyes seemed
broken, moved, directed into fiery shafts.

See, too, the reproach of little, sharp, grey eyes addressed to Hazlitt.
There are neither large nor small eyes, say physiologists, or the
difference is so small as to be negligeable. But in the eyelids the
difference is great between large and small, and also between the
varieties of largeness. Some have large openings, and some are in
themselves broad and long, serenely covering eyes called small. Some
have far more drawing than others, and interesting foreshortenings and
sweeping curves.

Where else is spirit so evident? And where else is it so spoilt? There
is no vulgarity like the vulgarity of vulgar eyelids. They have a slang
all their own, of an intolerable kind. And eyelids have looked all the
cruel looks that have ever made wounds in innocent souls meeting them
surprised.

But all love and all genius have winged their flight from those slight
and unmeasurable movements, have flickered on the margins of lovely
eyelids quick with thought. Life, spirit, sweetness are there in a small
place; using the finest and the slenderest machinery; expressing meanings
a whole world apart, by a difference of material action so fine that the
sight which appreciates it cannot detect it; expressing intricacies of
intellect; so incarnate in slender and sensitive flesh that nowhere else
in the body of man is flesh so spiritual.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLOUR OF LIFE***

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