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- our clayey natures can assume. The poet has sung:--
‘When first the Rhodian’s mimic art array’d
The queen of Beauty in her Cyprian shade,
The happy master mingled on his piece
Each look that charm’d him in the fair of Greece.
To faultless nature true, he stole a grace
From every finer form and sweeter face;
And, as he sojourn’d on the Ægean isles,
Woo’d all their love and treasured all their smiles;
Then glow’d the tints, pure, precious, and refined,
And mortal charms seemed heavenly when combined.’
Now, had this same Apelles flourished in our own enlightened day, and
more particularly, had he taken up his domicile in this goodly village,
I could with ease have presented him with many a Hebe, in whom were
united all the requisite graces which make up the beau-ideal of female
loveliness. Nor, my dear M----, does there reign in all this bright
display that same monotony of feature, form, complexion, which elsewhere
is beheld; no, here are all varieties, all the orders of Beauty’s
architecture; the Doric, the Ionic, the Corinthian, all are here.
I have in ‘my mind’s eye, Horatio,’ three (the number of the Graces, you
remember) who may stand, each at the head of their respective orders.
The one, were she arrayed in sylvan garb, and did she in her hand carry
her bow, might with equal justice and propriety stand, the picture of
Diana herself. Her figure is bold, her stature erect and tall, her
presence queenly and commanding, and her complexion is clear and fair as
the face of heaven on a May day, through which sparkles an eye of that
indefinable hue, which is beyond comparison the most striking that can
garnish the human countenance. The vermilion in her cheeks perpetually
wears that ruddy, healthful tint, which one is accustomed to behold
illumine, but for a moment, alas! the face of a city belle when she
takes her annual ramble in the country, to revel for a period in the
retreats of rustic life.
If to these qualities you superadd that majesty of carriage and dignity
of mien, which we would fancy the royal mistress of Antony to have
possessed; together with that heroic and Grecian cast of countenance
which the imagination unconsciously ascribes to the Jewess, Rebecca,
when resisting the vile arts of the Templar--you have in my poor opinion
the portraiture of ⸻.
When I venture to describe the second of this beautiful trinity, I feel
my powers of delineation inadequate to the task; but nevertheless I will
try my hand at the matter, although, like an unskilful limner, I am
fearful I shall but scandalise the charms I endeavour to copy.
Come to my aid, ye guardian spirits of the Fair! Guide my awkward hand,
and preserve from mutilation the features ye hover over and protect!
Pour down whole floods of sparkling champagne, my dear M----, until your
brain grows giddy with emotion; con over the latter portion of the first
canto of _Childe Harold_, and ransack your intellectual repository for
the liveliest visions of the Fairy Land, and you will be in a measure
prepared to relish the epicurean banquet I shall spread.
The stature of this beautiful mortal (if she be indeed of earth) is of
that perfect height, which, while it is freed from the charge of being
low, cannot with propriety be denominated tall. Her figure is slender
almost to fragility, but strikingly modelled in spiritual elegance, and
is the only form I ever saw, which could bear the trial of a rigid
criticism.
Every man who is gifted with the least particle of imagination, must in
some of his reveries have conjured up from the realms of fancy, a being
bright and beautiful beyond everything he had ever before apprehended,
whose main and distinguishing attribute invariably proves to be a form
the indescribable loveliness of which seems to
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