and a fair shoulder crowded
against the musical pilgrim, in the Capella Sistiera, will be taken
surer into his soul's inner memory than the best outdoing of "the
sky-lark taken up into heaven," by the ravishing reach of the
_Miserere_. Is it not true?

There can hardly be now, I think, a style of female beauty of which I
have not appreciated the meaning and comparative enchantment, nor a
degree of that sometimes more effective thing than beauty itself--its
expression breathing through features otherwise unlovely--that I have
not approached near enough to weigh and store truthfully in
remembrance. The taste forever refines in the study of woman. We
return to what, with immature eye, we at first rejected; we intensify,
immeasurably, our worship of the few who wear on their foreheads the
star of supreme loveliness, confessed pure and perfect by all
beholders alike; we detect it under surfaces which become transparent
only with tenderness or enthusiasm; we separate the work of Nature's
material chisel from the resistless and warm expansion of the soul
swelling its proportions to fill out the shape it is to tenant
hereafter. Led by the purest study of true beauty, the eager mind
passes on from the shrine where it lingered to the next of whose
greater brightness it becomes aware; and this is the secret of one
kind of "inconstancy in love," which should be named apart from the
variableness of those seekers of novelty, who, from unconscious
self-contempt, value nothing they have had the power to win.

An unsuspected student of beauty, I passed years of loiterings in the
living galleries of Europe and Asia, and, like self-punishing misers
in all kinds of amassings, stored up boundlessly more than, with the
best trained senses, I could have found the life to enjoy. Of course I
had a first advantage, of dangerous facility, in my unhappy plainness
of person--the alarm-guard that surrounds every beautiful woman in
every country of the world--letting sleep at _my_ approach the
cautionary reserve which presents bayonet so promptly to the
good-looking. Even with my worship avowed, and the manifestation of
grateful regard which a woman of fine quality always returns for
elevated and unexacting admiration I was still left with such
privilege of access as is granted to the family-gossip, or to an
innocuous uncle, and it is of such a passion, rashly nurtured under
this protection of an improbability, that I propose to tell the
_inner_ s