ebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, her talk. It was hiding in her
paleness, and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison. It leapt
and looked, at a word. It was conscious in the fingers that reached out
flowers. It ran with her. It was silenced when she hushed her answers
to the king. Everywhere it was close behind the doors--everywhere but in
her eyes.

How near at hand was it, then, in the living eyelids that expressed her
in their minute and instant and candid manner! All her withdrawals,
every hesitation, fluttered there. A flock of meanings and intelligences
alighted on those mobile edges.

Think, then, of all the famous eyes in the world, that said so much, and
said it in no other way but only by the little exquisite muscles of their
lids. How were these ever strong enough to bear the burden of those eyes
of Heathcliff's in "Wuthering Heights"? "The clouded windows of Hell
flashed a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out, however,
was so dimmed and drowned--" That mourning fiend, who had wept all
night, had no expression, no proof or sign of himself, except in the
edges of the eyelids of the man.

And the eyes of Garrick? Eyelids, again. And the eyes of Charles
Dickens, that were said to contain the life of fifty men? On the
mechanism of the eyelids hung that fifty-fold vitality. "Bacon had a
delicate, lively, hazel eye," says Aubrey in his "Lives of Eminent
Persons." But nothing of this belongs to the eye except 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.