BEAUTY AND GRACE WONDERFULLY

ANNEXED.

Beauty is a lively shining or glittering brightness, resulting from ettused good, by ideas, seeds, reasons, shadows, stirring up our minds, that by this good they may be united and made one, as Plato saith. Others will have beauty to be the perfection of the whole composition, caused out of the congruous symmetry, measure, order, and manner of parts: and that comeliness which proceeds from this beauty is called grace; and from thence all fair things are gracious; for grace and beauty are so wonderfully annexed, so sweetly and gently win our souls, and strongly allure, that they confound our judgment, and cannot be distinguished. Beauty and grace are like those beams and shinings that come from the glorious and divine sun, which are diverse, as they proceed from diverse objects, to please and affect our several senses; as the species of beauty are taken at our eyes, ears, or conceived in our inner soul, as Plato disputes at large in his "Dialogue de Pulchro, Phædro, Hippias," and, after many sophistical errors confuted, concludes that beauty is a grace in all things delighting the eyes, ears, and soul itself; so that, as Valesius infers hence, whatsoever pleaseth our ears, eyes, and soul, must needs be beautiful, fair, and delightsome to us. And nothing can more please our ears than music, or pacify our minds. Fair houses, pictures, orchards, gardens, fields, a fair hawk, a fair horse, is most acceptable unto us; whatsoever pleaseth our eyes and ears we call beautiful and fair. Pleasure belongeth to the rest of the senses, but grace and beauty to these two alone. As the objects vary and are diverse, so they diversely affect our eyes, ears, and soul itself: which gives occasion to some to make so many several kinds of love as there be objects: one beauty ariseth from God-of which, and divine love, St. Dionysius, with many fathers and Neotericks, have written just volumes, many parænetical discourses; another from His creatures. There is a beauty of the body, a beauty of the soul, a beauty from virtue (Austin calls it), which we see with the eyes of our mind, which beauty, as Tully saith, if we could discern with these corporeal eyes, would cause admirable affections and ravish our souls.

Burton. The soft seraphic smile's attractive grace. Potter.

BEAUTY A PURE ETHEREAL RAY.

Know, beauty is a pure ethereal ray
Of fair celestial make, that issues forth
From the sole fount of light, and lustre
spreads

Through air and earth and heaven: o'd ocean feels

The influence of its beam: when tempests fly
They bear it on their wings: the firmament,
Radiant with starry orbs, light above light
In lucid order rais'd, aloud proclaims
The fair original. But man is raised
High in the scale of beings, and inform'd
With intellectual faculties that show
The beauty of the mind, by which he claims
Relation to his Maker, and partakes
Of rectitude divine: hence, moral acts
Which flow from reason, and obsequious will,
Are beautiful and good, because with God
Similitude they hold, whose sacred will,
Pure as His essence, never can divert
From what is right, and is itself the law
Which we call natural, as He only rules
As well the moral as material world.

A BLUSH, LIKE SUMMER SUNSET.

What a mysterious thing is a blush, that a single word, look, or thought should send that inimitable carnation over the cheek, like the soft tints of a summer's sunset! Strange, too, that it is only the face-the human face -that is capable of blushing. The hand or foot does not turn red with modesty or shame more than the glove or sock which covers it. It is the face that is heaven! There may be traced the intellectual phenomena with confidence amounting to a certainty.

Thackeray.

KISSES, A RICH ELIXIR OF DELIGHT.

Cupid, if storying legends tell aright,
Once framed a rich elixir of delight.
A chalice o'er love-kindled flames he fix'd,
And in it nectar and ambrosia mix'd :
With these, the magic dews which evening
brings,

Brush'd from the Idalian star by fairy wings,
Each tender pledge of sacred faith he join'd,
Each gentler pleasure of the unspotted
mind-

Day-dreams, whose tints with sportive brightness glow,

And Hope, the blameless parasite of Woe. The eyeless chemist heard the process rise, The steamy chalice bubbled up in sighs, Sweet sounds transpired, as when the enamour'd dove

Pours the soft murmuring of responsive love. The finish'd work might Envy vainly blame, And "Kisses" was the precious compound's

name.

With half the god his Cyprian mother blest, And breath'd on Sara's lovelier lips the rest. S. T. Coleridge.

It

THE VALUE OF A SMILE. Who can tell the value of a smile? costs nothing to the giver, but is beyond price to the erring and relenting, the sad and cheerless, the lost and forsaken. It disarms malice, subdues temper, turns hatred to love, revenge to kindness, and paves the darkest paths with gems of sunlight. A smile on the brow betrays a kind heart, a pleasant friend, an affectionate brother, a dutiful son, a happy husband. It adds a charm to beauty, it decorates the face of the deformed, and makes a lovely woman resemble an angel in Paradise. McLeod.

TRUTH AND STEADFASTNESS IN

WOMEN.

For this ye know well, though I wouldin lie, In women is all truth and steadfastness; For, in good faith, I nev'r of them sie,

But much worship, bounty, and gentleness, Right coming, air, and full of meekèness; Good and glad, and lowly, I you ensure, Is this goodly and angelic creatûre.

And if it hap a man be in disease,

She doth her business and her full pain With all her might him to comfort and please; If fro his disease him she might restrain: In word ne deed, I wis, she woll not faine; With all her might she doth her business To bringen him out of his heaviness. Lo, here what gentleness these women have, If we could know it for our rudèness! How busy they be us to keep and save Both in hele and also in sickness, And alway right sorry for our distress! In every manère thus shew they ruth, That in them is all goodness and all truth. Chaucer.

SOUL-FULL EYES.

Ask me not why I should love her;
Look upon these soul-full eyes!
Look while mirth or feeling move her,
And see there how sweetly rise
Thoughts gay and gentle from a breast,
Which is of innocence the nest,
Which though each joy were from it shed,
By truth would still be tenanted!

See, from these sweet windows peeping,
Emotions tender, bright and pure,
And wonder not the faith I'm keeping
Every trial can endure !

Wonder not that looks so winning
Still for me new ties are spinning;
Wonder not that heart so true
Keeps mine from ever changing too.
Charles F. Hoffmann.

CONCENTRATED RAYS OF BEAUTY.

The sparkling eye, the mantling cheek,
The polished front, the snowy neck,
How seldom we behold in one!
Glossy locks, and brow serene,
Venus' smiles, Diana's mien,

All meet in you, and you alone.
Beauty, like other powers, maintains
Her empire, and by union reigns;

Each single feature faintly warms : But where at once we view display'd Unblemish'd grace, the perfect maid

Our eyes, our ears, our heart alarms. So when on earth the god of day Obliquely sheds his temper'd ray,

Through convex orbs the beams transmit, The beams that gently warm'd before, Collected, gently warm no more, But glow with more prevailing heat.

Cowper.

IN THINE EVERY MOTION MUSICAL.

Maiden, when such a soul as thine is born, The morning stars their ancient music make,

And, joyful, once again their song awake, Long silent now with melancholy scorn; And thou, not mindless of so blest a morn,

By no least deed its harmony shall break, But shalt to that high chime thy footsteps take,

Through life's most darksome passes unforlorn ;

Therefore from thy pure faith thou shalt
not fall,

Therefore shalt thou be ever fair and free,
And in thine every motion musical
As summer air, majestic as the sea,

A mystery to those who creep and crawl Through Time, and part it from Eternity. Lowell.

THE BEAUTIFUL ALONE IS REAI

Only the beautiful is real:

All things whereof our life is full,

All mysteries that life enwreathe,
Birth, life and death,

All that we dread or darkly feel,-
All are but shadows; and the beautiful
Alone is real.

Love, truth, and beauty-all are one:
If life may expiate

The wilderings of its dimness, death be known

But as the mighty ever-living gate Into the beautiful-all things flow on Into one heart, into one melody, Eternally.

W. J. Linton.

RECIPROCITY.

The kiss you take is paid by that you give; The joy is mutual, and I'm still in debt. Lord Lansdowne.

THE LOVING SMILE.

Not all the mines of all the rew-found worlds,

Nor all the gums and incense we can boast, Can be equivalent to one kind smile from thee. Darcy.

SURPASSING BEAUTY.

My lady's beauty 'passeth more the best of yours than doth the sun the candlelight, or brightest day the darkest night.

Henry, Earl of Surrey.

She 'pass'd the rest as far as doth the sun another little star. Harington.

THE SOUL THAT BEAUTY CLOTHES.

The beauty of a lovely woman is like music. What can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond, and far above the one woman's soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them: it is more than a woman's love that moves us in a woman's eyes it seems to be a far-off mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness - by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty, and for this reason, the noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the one woman's soul that the beauty clothes. George Eliot.

MY HEART WOULD HEAR HER AND BEAT.
She is coming, my own, my sweet!
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthly bed.

Tennyson.

THE VARIOUS TRAITS OF BEAUTY. Every trait of beauty may be referred to some virtue, as to Innocence, Candour, Generosity, Modesty, and Heroism. St. Pierre.

THUS SHE DREW ME ON TO LOVE HER.

Thus, her foot upon the new-mown grass, bareheaded, with the flowing

Of the virginal white vesture gather'd closely to her throat,

And the golden ringlets on her neck just quicken'd by her going,

And appearing to breathe sun for air, and doubting if to float.

With a branch of dewy maple, which her right hand held above her,

And which trembled a green shadow in betwixt her and the skies,

As she turn'd her face in going, thus she drew me on to love her,

And to worship the divineness of the smile hid in her eyes.

For her eyes alone smile constantly; her lips have serious sweetness,

And her front is calm, the dimple rarely ripples on the cheek;

But her deep blue eyes smile constantly, as if they in discreetness

Kept the secret of a happy dream she did

not care to speak.

Mrs. Browning.