whose brow was straight and prominent—the sign of intellectual power.
Michael Angelo had a strong bar of bone over his eyes.
Mrs. Frances A. Kemble in Record of a Girlhood, vol. ii. p. 3, thus describes young Hallam’s appearance. “There was a gentleness and purity almost virginal in his voice, manner, and countenance; and the upper part of his face, his forehead and eyes (perhaps in readiness for his early translation), wore the angelic radiance that they still must wear in heaven. Some time or other, at some rare moments of the divine Spirit’s supremacy in our souls, we all put on the heavenly face that will be ours hereafter, and for a brief lightning space our friends behold us as we shall look when this mortal has put on immortality. On Arthur Hallam’s brow and eyes this heavenly light, so fugitive on other human faces, rested habitually, as if he was thinking and seeing in heaven.”
LXXXVIII.
He asks the “wild bird,” probably the nightingale, whose liquid song brings a sense of Eden back again, to define the feelings of the heart, its emotions and passions. In the “budded quicks” of Spring the bird is happy; in the “darkening leaf,” amid the shadowing foliage, though its happiness be gone, its grieving heart can still cherish “a secret joy.” The notes of the nightingale are supposed to be both sorrowful and joyous.
Even so, the Poet cannot wholly govern his own muse; for, when he would sing of woe,
“The glory of the sum of things,”
the grandeur of life’s experience, will sometimes rule the chords.
LXXXIX.