soldiers chained to a post on the sea-sands to die by inches in the rising
tide, till the sound of her hymns was slowly drowned in the dash of the
hungry leaping waves. My heart swelled within me, my eyes seemed bursting
from my head with the intensity of my gaze, and great tears, I knew not
why, rolled slowly down my face.

A woman's voice close to me, gentle yet of deeper tone than most, woke me
from my trance.

"You seem to be deeply interested in that picture?"

I looked round, yet not at the speaker. My eyes before they could meet
hers, were caught by an apparition the most beautiful I had ever yet
beheld. And what--what--have I seen equal to her since? Strange, that I
should love to talk of her. Strange, that I fret at myself now because
I cannot set down on paper line by line, and hue by hue, that wonderful
loveliness of which--. But no matter. Had I but such an imagination as
Petrarch, or rather, perhaps, had I his deliberate cold self-consciousness,
what volumes of similes and conceits I might pour out, connecting that
peerless face and figure with all lovely things which heaven and earth
contain. As it is, because I cannot say all, I will say nothing, but repeat
to the end again and again, Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beyond all
statue, picture, or poet's dream. Seventeen--slight but rounded, a
masque and features delicate and regular, as if fresh from the chisel of
Praxiteles--I must try to describe after all, you see--a skin of alabaster
(privet-flowers, Horace and Ariosto would have said, more true to Nature),
stained with the faintest flush; auburn hair, with that peculiar crisped
wave seen in the old Italian pictures, and the warm, dark hazel eyes which
so often accompany it; lips like a thread of vermillion, somewhat too thin,
perhaps--but I thought little of that then; with such perfect finish and