common pictures. He was the least _ad
captandum_ of workers. He avoided bright eyes, curls, and contours,
glancing lights, strong contrasts, and colors too crude for harmony. He
reduced his beauty to her elements, so that an inner beauty might play
through her features. Like the Catholic discipline which pales the face
of the novice with vigils, seclusion, and fasting, and thus makes room
and clears the way for the movements of the spirit, so in these figures
every vulgar grace is suppressed. No classic contours, no languishing
attitudes, no asking for admiration,--but a severe and chaste restraint,
a modest sweetness, a slumbering intellectual atmosphere, a graceful
self-possession, eyes so sincere and pure that heaven's light shines
through them, and, beyond all, a hovering spiritual life that makes each
form a presence.

Perhaps the two most remarkable and original of the pieces I have named
above are the "Beatrice" and the "Rosalie." Of the "Beatrice" there has
been much discussion whether she could have been intended to represent
the Beatrice of Dante. To me it appears that there is nothing like that
world- and heaven-renowned lady in this our Beatrice. She sits alone:
one sees that in the expression of her eyes. Her dress is of almost
conventual simplicity; the colors rich, but sober; the style flowing and
mediaeval. She has soft brown hair; soft, velvet-soft, brown eyes;
features not salient, but rounded into the contours of the head; her
whole expression receptive, yet radiant with sentiment. The complexion
of a tender rose, equally diffused, gives an indescribable air of
healthful delicacy to the face. The expression of the whole figure is
that of one in a very dream of sentiment. Her twilight eyes see without
effort into the very soul of things, as other eyes look at their
surfaces. The sentiment of this figure is so powerful that by its gentle
charm it fastens the beholder, who gazes and cannot withdraw his eyes,
wondering what is the spell that can so hold him to that face, which is
hardly beautiful, surely without surface beauty. I once heard a person
who was unaccustomed to the use of critical terms say of these creations
of Allston, "Here is beauty, but not the beauty that glares on you"; and
this phrase, so odd, but so original, well describes the beauty of this
Beatrice, who, though now transfigured by sentiment and capable of being
a home-goddess, does not seem intended to shine in starry circles.

B