celebrated belle, to see whether her claims would be supported by
"The mind, the music breathing from her face;" |
and who has not occasionally turned away repelled by the utter blank, or worse than blank, which the simple movement of the mouth, in speaking, or smiling, has revealed?
The language of poetry describes the loud laugh as indicative of the vulgar mind; and certainly there are expressions, conveyed even through the medium of a smile, which need not Lavater to inform us that refinement of feeling, or elevation of soul, have little to do with the fair countenance on which they are impressed. On the other hand, there are plain women sometimes met with in society, every movement of whose features is instinct with intelligence; who, from the genuine heart-warm smiles which play about the mouth, the sweetly modulated voice, and the lighting up of an eye that looks as if it could "comprehend the universe," becomes perfectly beautiful to those who understand them, and still more so to those who live with them, and love them. Before such pretensions to beauty as these, how soon do the pink and white of a merely pretty face vanish into nothing!
Yet, if the beauty of expression should be less popular amongst women, from the circumstance of its being less admired by men than that of mere form and complexion, they do well in this, as in every other disputed question of ultimate good, to look to the end. Men have been found whose admiration of beauty was so great, that they have actually married for that alone, content, for its sake, to dispense with the presence of mind. And what has been the end to them, or rather to the luckless beings whose misfortune it was to be the objects of their choice?—A neglected and degraded lot, imbittered by the fretfulness of dis-
