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 to stir.
Let the kind, candid blue eyes meet yours, as they met mine, with
the one matchless look which we both remember so well. Let her
voice speak the music that you once loved best, attuned as sweetly
to your ear as to mine. Let her footstep, as she comes and goes,