is apt to
slip out somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the
portrait dead for the lack of it.

*****

Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that
of the deaf who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are
others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent
nature, who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have
neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a
responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people
truly made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can
undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can speak no
language under heaven.

*****

For my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the possession
of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have
a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with
every feeling; to be elegant arid delightful in person, so that we shall
please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may never discredit
speech with uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own burlesques.
But of all unfortunates there is one creature (for I will not call
him man) conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who has forfeited his
birthright of expression, who has cultivated artful intonations, who has
taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey, and on every side perverted
or cut off his means of communication with his fellow-men. The body is a
house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying
on the passersby to come and love us. But this fellow has filled his
windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured. His house may be admired
for its design, the crowd may pause before the stained windows, but
meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie languishing within, uncomforted,
unchangeably alone.

*****

The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure and the desire
to rise in Life, and leave their homespun elders grumbling and wondering
over the event. Once, at a village called Lausanne, I met one of these
disappointed parents: a drake who had fathered a wild swan and seen it
take wing and disappear. The wild swan in question was now an apothecary
in Brazil. He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first landed in America,
bare-headed and bare-footed, and with a single halfpenny in his pocket.
And now he was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing is an adventurou