For all Falsehood is dissonant--and verity is consent. It is our
faith, that the souls of some women are angelic--or nearly so--by nature
and the Christian religion; and that the faces and persons of some women
are angelic, or nearly so--whose souls, nevertheless, are seen to be far
otherwise--and, on that discovery, beauty fades or dies. But may not
soul and body--spirit and matter--meet in perfect union at birth; and
grow together into a creature, though of spiritual mould, comparable
with Eve before the Fall? Such a creature--such creatures--may have
been; but the question is--did you ever see one? We almost think that we
have--but many long years ago;

"She is dedde,
Gone to her death-bedde
All under the willow-tree."

And it may be that her image in the moonlight of memory and imagination
may be more perfectly beautiful than she herself ever was, when

"Upgrew that living flower beneath our eye."

Yes--'tis thus that we form to ourselves--incommunicably within our
souls--what we choose to call Ideal Beauty--that is, a life-in-death
image or Eidolon of a Being whose voice was once heard, and whose
footsteps once wandered among the flowers of this earth. But it is a
mistake to believe that such beauty as this can visit the soul only
after the original in which it once breathed is no more. For as it can
only be seen by profoundest passion--and the profoundest are the
passions of Love, and Pity, and Grief--then why may not each and all of
these passions--when we consider the constitution of this world and this
life--be awakened in their utmost height and depth by the sight of
living beauty, as well as by the memory of the dead? To do so is surely
within "the reachings of our souls,"--and if so, then may the virgin
beauty of his daughter, praying with folded hands and heavenward face
when leaning in health on her father's knees, transcend even the ideal
beauty which shall afterwards visit his slumbers nightly, long years
after he has laid her head in the grave. If by ideal beauty you mean a
beauty beyond whatever breathed, and moved, and had its being on
earth--then we suspect that not even "that inner eye which is the bliss
of solitude" ever beheld it; but if you merely mean by ideal beauty,
that which is composed of ideas, and of the feelings attached by nature
to ideas, then, begging your pardon, my good sir, all beauty whatever is
ideal--and you had better begin to study metaphysics.

But what