(New York World, November 7, 1882.)

It is only in the best Greek gems, on the silver coins of Syracuse, or
among the marble figures of the Parthenon frieze, that one can find the
ideal representation of the marvellous beauty of that face which laughed
through the leaves last night as Hester Grazebrook.

Pure Greek it is, with the grave low forehead, the exquisitely arched
brow; the noble chiselling of the mouth, shaped as if it were the
mouthpiece of an instrument of music; the supreme and splendid curve of
the cheek; the augustly pillared throat which bears it all: it is Greek,
because the lines which compose it are so definite and so strong, and yet
so exquisitely harmonised that the effect is one of simple loveliness
purely: Greek, because its essence and its quality, as is the quality of
music and of architecture, is that of beauty based on absolutely
mathematical laws.

But while art remains dumb and immobile in its passionless serenity, with
the beauty of this face it is different: the grey eyes lighten into blue
or deepen into violet as fancy succeeds fancy; the lips become flower-
like in laughter or, tremulous as a bird's wing, mould themselves at last
into the strong and bitter moulds of pain or scorn. And then motion
comes, and the statue wakes into life. But the life is not the ordinary
life of common days; it is life with a new value given to it, the value
of art: and the charm to me of Hester Grazebrook's acting in the first
scene of the play {43} last night was that mingling of classic grace with
absolute reality which is the secret of all beautiful art, of the plastic
work of the Greeks and of the pictures of Jean Francois Millet equally.

I do not think that the sovereignty and empire of women's beauty has at