Beauty is a witch
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
_D. Pedro_.--If thou wilt hold longer argument,
Do it in notes.
_Benedick_.--Now, _divine air_, now is his soul ravished.
_Much Ado about Nothing_.
Morton visited his cousin, Miss Fanny Euston, a guest, for a few days,
at a friend's house in town. By good fortune, as he thought it, he
found her alone; and, as he conversed with her, he employed
himself--after a practice usual with him--in studying her character,
and making internal comments upon it. These insidious reflections,
condensed into a paragraph, would have been somewhat as follows:--
"A fine figure, and a very handsome face; but there is a lurking devil
in her eye, and about the corners of her mouth." Here some ten minutes
of animated dialogue ensued before his observations had shaped
themselves into further results. "She is exceedingly clever; she knows
how to think and act for herself. I should not like to cross her will.
There is fire enough in her to make a hundred women interesting. She
is none of our frosty New England beauties. She could love a man to
the death, and hate him as well. She could be a heroine or a tigress.
Every thing about her is wild and chaotic, the unformed elements of a
superb woman."
Here, the conversation having lasted a half hour or more, his
imagination began to disturb the deductions of his philosophy, and he
was no longer in a mood of just psychological analysis, when, to his
vexation, his cousin's hostess, Miss Jones, entering, brought his
_tete-a-tete_ to a close. She displayed a marvellous fluency of
discourse, and was eloquent upon books, parties, paintings, and the
opera.
"I need not ask you, Mr. Morton, if you have seen Tennyson's new
poem."
"Yes--at the bookseller's."
"But surely you have read it."
"No, I am behind the age."
"Then thank Heaven for it," exclaimed his unceremonious cousin; "for
of all insipidity, and affectation, and fine-spun, wire-drawn trash,
Tennyson carries away the palm. Every body reads him because he is the
fashion, and every body admires him because he is the fashion. But he
is a bubble, a film, a gossamer; there's nothing in him."
This explosion called forth a protest from the poet's admirer.
"May I ask," said Morton to his cousin, "who are your literary
favorites?"
"Not the latter-day poets--the Tennysonian school; their puling
mannerism is an insult to the Saxon tongue."
"But," urged Miss Jones, "you are not quite reasonable."
"Of course I am not. It's not a woman's province to be reasonable."
"Do you subscribe to these poetical heresies, Mr. Morton?"
"On the contrary, I think that Tennyson has often great beauties."
"If he sometimes wrote like an angel," pursued Fanny Euston, "I should
find no patience to see it in a man who could put upon paper such
parrot rhymes as these:--
'Not a whit of thy tuwhoo,
Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,
Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,
With a lengthened loud halloo,
Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o!'
Bah! it puts one in a passion to hear such twaddle."
"I see," said her friend, "that nothing less than your own music will
calm your indignation. Pray let us hear the ballad which you set to
music this morning."
"I will sing, if you wish it; but not that ballad."
And she seated herself before the open piano.
"What do you choose, Mr. Morton?"
"The Marseillaise. That, I think, is in your vein."
"Ah! you can choose well!"
And, running her fingers over the keys, she launched at once into the
warlike strains of the hymn of revolution. Her voice and execution
were admirable; and though by no means unconscious that she was
producing an effect, she sang with a fire, energy, and seeming
recklessness that thrilled like lightning through her auditor's veins.
He rose involuntarily from his seat. For that evening his study of
character was ended, and philosophy dislodged from her last
stronghold.
Half an hour later he was riding homeward in a mood quite novel to his
experience. He pushed his horse to a keen trot, as if by fierceness of
motion to keep pace with the fiery influence that was kindling all his
nerves.
"I have had my fancies before this," he thought,--"in fact I have
almost been in love; but that feeling was no more like this than a
draught from a clear spring is like a draught of spiced wine."
That night he fully expected to be haunted by a vision of Fanny
Euston; but his slumbers were unromantically dreamless.
Three days later, he ventured another visit; but his cousin had
returned to her home in the country. By this time he was conscious of
a great abatement of ardor; and his equanimity was little moved by the
disappointment. In a week he had learned to look back on his transient
emotion as an effervescence of the moment, and to regard his relative
with no slight interest, indeed, yet by no means in a light which
could blind him to her glaring faults. He summoned up all that he
could recall of herself and her family, and chiefly of her father,
whom he remembered in his boyhood as a rough, athletic man, whose
black and bushy eyebrows were usually contracted into something which
seemed like a frown. These boyish recollections were far from doing
Euston justice. He was a man of masculine and determined character.
His will was strong, his passions violent; he was full of prejudices,
and when thwarted or contradicted, his rage was formidable. His honor
was unquestioned; he was most bluntly and unmanageably honest. Yet
through the rock and iron of his character, there ran, known to but
few, a delicate vein of poetic feeling. The music of his daughter, or
the verses of his favorite Burns, could often bring tears to his stern
gray eyes. For his wife, whom he had married in a fit of pique and
disappointment, when little more than a boy, he cared nothing; but his
fondness for his daughter was unbounded. He alone could control her;
for she loved him ardently, and he was the only living thing of which
she stood in awe.