seem to you older and graver. He is absorbed in the care that weighs on
him. When you see him in a holiday moment at his own fireside, the care
is thrown aside; perhaps he mastered while abroad the difficulty that had
troubled him; he is cheerful, pleasant, sunny. This appears to be very
much the case with persons of genius. When in their own houses we
usually find them very playful and childlike. Most persons of real
genius, whatever they may seem out of doors, are very sweet-tempered at
home, and sweet temper is sympathizing and genial in the intercourse of
private life. Certainly, observing this girl as she now bends over the
flowers, it would be difficult to believe her to be the Isaura Cicogna
whose letters to Madame de Grantinesnil exhibit the doubts and struggles
of an unquiet, discontented, aspiring mind. Only in one or two passages
in those letters would you have guessed at the writer in the girl as we
now see her. It is in those passages where she expresses her love of
harmony, and her repugnance to contest: those were characteristics you
might have read in her face.

Certainly the girl is very lovely: what long dark eyelashes! what soft,
tender, dark-blue eyes! now that she looks up and smiles, what a
bewitching smile it is! by what sudden play of rippling dimples the smile
is enlivened and redoubled! Do you notice one feature? In very showy
beauties it is seldom noticed; but I, being in my way a physiognomist,
consider that it is always worth heeding as an index of character. It is
the ear. Remark how delicately it is formed in her: none of that
heaviness of lobe which is a sure sign of sluggish intellect and coarse
perception. Hers is the artist's ear. Note next those hands: how
beautifully shaped! small, but not doll-like hands,--ready and nimble,
firm and nervous hands, that could work for a helpmate. By no means very
white, still less red, but somewhat embrowned as by the sun, such as you
may see in girls reared in southern climes, and in her perhaps betokening