Komel was almost too beautiful. With every grace and delicacy of
outline that has, for centuries, rendered her sex so famed in her
native land, she added also a sweet, natural intelligence, which,
though all uncultivated, was yet ever beaming from her eyes, and
speaking forth from her face. Her form possessed a most captivating
voluptuous fullness, without once trespassing upon the true lines of
female delicacy. Her large and lustrous eyes were brilliant yet
plaintive, her lips red and full, and the features generally of a
delicate Grecian cast. Her hair was of that dark, glossy hue, that
defies comparison, and was heavy and luxuriant in its fullness.

Some one has said that no one can write real poetry until he has
known the sting of unhappiness; and sure it is that beauty ever
lacks that moss-rose finish that tender melancholy throws about it,
until it has known what sorrow is. Komel had been called to mourn,
and melancholy had thrown about her a gentle glow of plaintiveness,
as a grateful angel added another grace to the rose that had
sheltered its slumber, by a shroud of moss.

While she was yet but a little child, her only brother, but little
older than herself, and whom she loved with all the sisterly
tenderness of her young heart, had strayed away from home to the
seaside, and been drowned. From that day she had sorrowed for his
loss, and even now as memory recalled her early playmate, the tears
would dim her eyes, nor did her spirits seem ever entirely free from
the grief that had imbued them at her brother's loss. This hue of
tender melancholy was in Komel only an additional beauty, as we have
said, and lent its witchery to her other charms.