The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, conceal their art.  It is often through the face externally less perfect, faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses of the interior light in its divine operation.  We seem to look into the very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of combination.  No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it is still spirit.  In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive that there can be beauty in any other types as well.  Yet, because we chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no more Titian?  Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight.  We cannot conceive how beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal.

The beauty we love is very silent.  It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks.  How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, victoriously alive?

Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life.  Some contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love.  Moralists have perhaps not realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste.  Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour!  And, alas! it is to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the Mephistopheles of experience.

As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of the raven-haired in their middle age, and vice versa.  The change is but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be.  It is a part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves—­in fact, a little more so,—­and their tastes and ways of looking at things may be worth pondering, after all.  But, O when we have arrived at this stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions