work for thirty years! She has lost both her arms and one of her feet,
which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made
good!

She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand
years old, or more; but she is ever young--

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety!"

and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of
the famous statue at the Louvre.

They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny--a libel.
She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is
on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue
incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her
lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot--a very beautiful foot,
though by no means a small one--it has never worn a high-heel shoe!

Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates
nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and
worship--and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel--not indeed with the
living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around--mere life
is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match
it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living
beauty justice--a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of
ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have
been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory
for chemistry!