ind of Music breathing in her face_
or,
_Mind on her lip and music in her face._
_A heart where softness harmonized the whole_
_And oh! her eye was in itself a Soul!_--[MS.]

[133] This expression has met with objections. I will not refer to "Him
who hath not Music in his soul," but merely request the reader to
recollect, for ten seconds, the features of the woman whom he believes
to be the most beautiful; and, if he then does not comprehend fully what
is feebly expressed in the above line, I shall be sorry for us both. For
an eloquent passage in the latest work of the first female writer of
this, perhaps of any, age, on the analogy (and the immediate comparison
excited by that analogy) between "painting and music," see vol. iii.
cap. 10, De l'Allemagne. And is not this connection still stronger with
the original than the copy? with the colouring of Nature than of Art?
After all, this is rather to be felt than described; still I think there
are some who will understand it, at least they would have done had they
beheld the countenance whose speaking harmony suggested the idea; for
this passage is not drawn from imagination but memory,{A} that mirror
which Affliction dashes to the earth, and looking down upon the
fragments, only beholds the reflection multiplied!

[For the simile of the broken mirror, compare _Childe Harold_, Canto
III. stanza xxxiii. line 1 (_Poetical Works_, ii. 236, note 2); and for
"the expression," "music breathing from her face," compare Sir Thomas
Browne's _Religio Medici_, Part II. sect, ix., _Works_, 1835, ii. 106,
"And sure there is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which
Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of any instrument;" and
Lovelace's "Song," _Orpheus to Beasts_--

"Oh could you view the melody
Of ev'ry grace,
And music of her face!"

The effect of the appeal to Madame de Stael is thus recorded in Byron's
_Journal_ of December 7, 1813 (_Letters_, 1898, ii. 369): "This morning,
a very pretty billet from the Stael," (for passage in _De L'Allemagne_,
Part III. chap, x., and the "billet," see _Letters,_ ii. 354, note 1)
... "She has been pleased to be pleased with my slight eulogy in the
note annexed to _The Bride_."]

{A} _In this line I have not drawn from fiction but memory--that mirror
of regret memory--the too faithful mirror of affliction the long vista
through which we gaze. Someone has said that the perfection of
Architecture is