“This is a strange repose, to be asleep
With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving,
And yet so fast asleep.”
Beautiful faces too often lack animation.
As a natural consequence, beautiful faces lack another thing. A young face to be pleasing must hold out a promise, just as an older face to be pleasing must tell a story. Now there are more unbeautiful young faces that hold out a promise than there are beautiful young faces that do this, just as there are more unbeautiful older faces that tell a story than there are beautiful older faces that do this.
In like manner, the regularity of line that is a main part of beauty is often attended by defects in another direction, calculated to arouse comment such as the following, being a speech made in reference to a woman of great beauty—
“Her profile is delicious, but her full face is an empty face.”
The woman in question lacked somewhat in intellectuality. A beautiful woman—so fairly on the whole are gifts distributed—is rarely a clever woman, and a beautiful girl is often a goose. Thus it was a beautiful girl of not ten but twenty years of age, who put to paper this account of Spain—
“That is where the Inquisition was, and there are bull-fights there, and the ladies wear black on their heads, and Westward Ho! was there.”
It was a beautiful girl who asked lately—