BY N. P. WILLIS.
That the truths arrived at by the unaccredited short road of "magnetism" had better be stripped of their technical phraseology, and set down as the gradual discoveries of science and experience, is a policy upon which acts many a sagacious believer in "clairvoyance." Doubtless, too, there is, here and there, a wise man, who is glad enough to pierce, with the eyes of 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; 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 story.
PART II.
I was at the Baths of Lucca during a season made gay by the presence of a large proportion of the agreeable and accessible court of Tuscany. The material for my untiring study was in abundance, yet it was all of the worldly character which the attractions of the place would naturally draw together, and my homage had but a choice between differences of display, in the one pursuit of admiration. In my walks through the romantic mountain-paths of the neighborhood, and along the banks of the deep-down river that threads the ravine above the village, I had often met, meantime, a lady accompanied by a well-bred and scholar-like looking man; and though she invariably dropped her veil at my approach, her admirable movement, as she walked, or stooped to pick a flower, betrayed that conscious possession of beauty and habitual confidence in her own grace and elegance, which assured me of attractions worth taking trouble to know. By one of those "unavoidable accidents" which any respectable guardian angel will contrive, to oblige one, I was a visiter to the gentleman and lady—father and daughter—soon after my curiosity had framed the desire; and in her I found a marvel of beauty, from which I looked in vain for my usual escape—that of placing the ladder of my heart against a loftier and fairer.
Mr. Wangrave was one of those English gentlemen who would not exchange the name of an ancient and immemorially wealthy family for any title that their country could give them, and he used this shield of modest honor simply to protect himself in the enjoyment of habits, freed, as far as refinement and culture could do it, from the burthens and intrusions of life above and below him. He was ceaselessly educating himself—like a man whose whole life was only too brief an apprenticeship to a higher existence—and, with an invalid but intellectual and lovely wife, and a daughter who seemed unconscious that she could love, and who kept gay pace with her youthful-hearted father in his lighter branches of knowledge, his family sufficed to itself, and had determined so to continue while abroad. The society of no Continental watering-place has a very good name, and they were there for climate and seclusion. With two ladies, who seemed to occupy the places and estimation of friends, (but who were probably the paid nurse and companion to the invalid,) and a kind-hearted old secretary to Mr. Wangrave, whose duties consisted in being as happy as he could possibly be, their circle was large enough, and it contained elements enough—except only, perhaps, the réveille that was wanting for the apparently slumbering heart of Stephania.