an incredible agent, the secrets
about him, and let the world give him credit, by whatever name they
please, for the superior knowledge of which he silently takes
advantage. I should be behind the time, if I had not sounded to the
utmost of my ability and opportunity the depth of this new medium. I
have tried it on grave things and trifles. If the unveiling which I am
about to record were of more use to myself than to others, perhaps I
should adopt the policy of which I have just spoken, and give the
result, simply as my own shrewd lesson learned in reading the female
heart. But the truths I unfold will instruct the few who need and can
appreciate them, while the whole subject is not of general importance
enough to bring down cavilers upon the credibility of their source. I
thus get rid of a very detestable though sometimes necessary evil,
("_qui nescit dissimulare nescit vivere_," says the Latin sage,) that
of shining by any light that is not absolutely my own.

I am a very plain man in my personal appearance--_so_ plain that a
common observer, if informed that there was a woman who had a fancy
for my peculiar type, would wonder that I was not thankfully put to
rest for life as a seeker after love--a second miracle of the kind
being a very slender probability. It is not in beauty that the taste
for beauty alone resides, however. In early youth my soul, like the
mirror of Cydippe, retained, with enamored fidelity, the image of
female loveliness copied in the clear truth of its appreciation, and
the passion for it had become, insensibly, the thirst of my life,
before I thought of it as more than an intoxicating study. To be
loved--myself beloved--by a creature made in one of the diviner moulds
of woman, was, however, a dream that shaped itself into waking
distinctness at last, and from that hour I took up the clogging weight
of personal disadvantages, to which I had hitherto unconsciously been
chained, and bore it heavily in the race which the well-favored ran as
eagerly as I.

I am not to recount, here, the varied experiences of my search, the
world over, after beauty and its smile. It is a search on which all
travelers are more than half bent, let them name as they please their
professed errand in far countries. The coldest scholar in art will
better remember a living face of a new cast of expression, met in the
gallery of Florence, than the best work of Michael Angelo, whose
genius he has crossed an ocean to study;