I am not to recount, here, the varied experiences of my search, the world over, after beauty and its smile. It is a search on which all travelers are more than half bent, let them name as they please their professed errand in far countries. The coldest scholar in art will better remember a living face of a new cast of expression, met in the gallery of Florence, than the best work of Michael Angelo, whose genius he has crossed an ocean to study; and a fair shoulder crowded against the musical pilgrim, in the Capella Sistiera, will be taken surer into his soul's inner memory than the best outdoing of "the sky-lark taken up into heaven," by the ravishing reach of the _Miserere_. Is it not true?
There can hardly be now, I think, a style of female beauty of which I have not appreciated the meaning and comparative enchantment, nor a degree of that sometimes more effective thing than beauty itself--its expression breathing through features otherwise unlovely--that I have not approached near enough to weigh and store truthfully in remembrance. The taste forever refines in the study of woman. We return to what, with immature eye, we at first rejected; we intensify, immeasurably, our worship of the few who wear on their foreheads the star of supreme loveliness, confessed pure and perfect by all beholders alike; we detect it under surfaces which become transparent only with tenderness or enthusiasm; we separate the work of Nature's material chisel from the resistless and warm expansion of the soul swelling its proportions to fill out the shape it is to tenant hereafter. Led by the purest study of true beauty, the eager mind passes on from the shrine where it lingered to the next of whose greater brightness it becomes aware; and this is the secret of one kind of "inconstancy in love," which should be named apart from the variableness of those seekers of novelty, who, from unconscious self-contempt, value nothing they have had the power to win.
An unsuspected student of beauty, I passed years of loiterings in the living galleries of Europe and Asia, and, like self-punishing misers in all kinds of amassings, stored up boundlessly more than, with the best trained senses, I could have found the life to enjoy. Of course I had a first advantage, of dangerous facility, in my unhappy plainness of person--the alarm-guard that surrounds every beautiful woman in every country of the world--letting sleep at _my_ approach the cautionary reserve which presents bayonet so promptly to the good-looking. Even with my worship avowed, and the manifestation of grateful regard which a woman of fine quality always returns for elevated and unexacting admiration I was still left with such privilege of access as is granted to the family-gossip, or to an innocuous uncle, and it is of such a passion, rashly nurtured under this protection of an improbability, that I propose to tell the _inner_ story.