blood like the jasmines' perfume,--more dangerous to the
soul than Aphrodite's kisses or Anacreon's drunken song.
By such arts did Cleopatra win the master spirit of the world
and make the mailed warrior her doting slave, indifferent
alike to honor and to duty, content but to live and love.
What wonder that the callow shepherd lad, unskilled in
woman's wile, believed that his mistress loved him?--
that his heart went out to the handsome coquette in a
wild, passionate throb in which all Heaven's angels sang
and Hell's demons shrieked!

A beautiful woman! Not the beauty of Greece, on which we
gaze as upon some wondrous flower wafted from Elysian
Fields, and too ethereal for this gross world; nor that of
Rome, with Pallas' snow-clad bosom and retrospective eye;
but the sensuous beauty of the far south, that casts a
Circean spell upon the souls of men. Her eyes are not
dove's eyes that softly shine along the path to Heaven, but
wandering fires that light the way to Hell. Her lips are not a
thread of scarlet, chaste as childhood and dewy as the
dawn, but the deep sullen red of a city swept with flames.
Her breasts are not like young roes that feed among the
lilies, but ivory hemispheres threaded with purple fire and
tinged with sunset's tawny gold. Reverently as though
touching divinity's robe, Joseph caresses the wanton curls
that stream like an inky storm-cloud over the shapely
shoulders--he puts the little hands, heavy with costly gems,
back from the tearful face and holds them with a grasp so
fierce that the massy rings of beaten gold bruise the tender
flesh. Mrs. Potiphar starts up, alarmed by his unwonted