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There is so much in our gradual acquaintance with Amenaïde to interest our sympathies, that at first we are inclined to think, if she should not prove what we hope, we shall yet be able to justify her conduct: there is so much to admire, that we shall not be able to condemn. What is the impression with which we leave her? Is it not with an utter shrinking of spirit from the fearful development of her deep-folded iniquity; from the withering aspect of her character, where intellectual beauty and moral deformity are so strikingly blended? We turn at once with instinctive disgust from the grosser embodyings of evil, abhorrent in their undisguised loathsomeness as the haggard forms and hideous heads of serpent-haired furies, and hence learn little of the essential guilt and overwhelming consequences of iniquity. But in this portraiture we read a high moral lesson; we look on it only to feel in our inmost being an ever widening recoil from the evil of one indulged sin, which can so weave a curse around all that was else lovely in the character. It is like gazing, till we are well nigh petrified with horror, on the sculptured head of Medusa, whose features are indeed faultlessly chiselled, while over them seems to hover a supernatural grace, but on whose marble brow one serpent darting out its sting of death, tells that a demon is there, and for ever enthroned for the misery and ruin of its victim.
Another portrait of equal truth, and yet greater beauty, is that of Amenaïde in "The Vow of the Peacock." There is not in the whole compass of modern poetry a character more lovely in itself or more touchingly wrought, than that of this high-souled yet gentle and devoted orphan. From our first introduction to her, as a sweet thoughtful child, whose chief happiness was her intense affection for her cousin and guardian, Count Leoni, valuing his
