composed
as she spoke, had this waxing and closing of the pupils; it went on all
the time like a slow, slow pulse. But such a thing is not to be seen
once a year.

Moreover, it is--though so significant--hardly to be called expression.
It is not articulate. It implies emotion, but does not define, or
describe, or divide it. It is touching, insomuch as we have knowledge of
the perturbed tide of the spirit that must cause it, but it is not
otherwise eloquent. It does not tell us the quality of the thought, it
does not inform and surprise as with intricacies. It speaks no more
explicit or delicate things than does the pulse in its quickening. It
speaks with less division of meanings than does the taking of the breath,
which has impulses and degrees.

No, the eyes do their work, but do it blankly, without communication.
Openings into the being they may be, but the closed cheek is more
communicative. From them the blood of Perdita never did look out. It
ebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, her talk. It was hiding in her
paleness, and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison. It leapt
and looked, at a word. It was conscious in the fingers that reached out
flowers. It ran with her. It was silenced when she hushed her answers
to the king. Everywhere it was close behind the doors--everywhere but in
her eyes.

How near at hand was it, then, in the living eyelids that expressed her
in their minute and instant and candid manner! All her withdrawals,
every hesitation, fluttered there. A flock of meanings and intelligences
alighted on those mobile edges.

Think, then, of all the famous eyes in the world, that said so much, and
said it in no other way but only by the little exquisite muscles of their
lids. How were these ever strong enough to bear the burden of those eyes
of Heathcliff's in "Wuthering Heights"? "The clouded windows of Hell
flashed a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out, however,
was so dimmed and drowned--" That mourning fiend, who had wept all
night, had no expression, no proof or sign of himself, except in the
edges of the eyelids of the man.

And the eyes of Garrick? Eyelids, again. And the eyes of Charles
Dickens, that were said to contain the life of fifty men? On the
mechanism of the eyelids hung that fifty-fold vitality. "Bacon had a
delicate, lively, hazel eye," says Aubrey in his "Lives of Eminent
Persons." But nothing of this belongs to the eye exce