[417] to the homesick heart of Park seemed the dark maids of Sego, as they sung their low and simple song of welcome beside his bed, and sought to comfort the white stranger, who had ‘no mother to bring him milk and no wife to grind him corn.’ Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper and more real loveliness. This was well understood by the old painters. In their pictures of Mary, the virgin mother, the beauty which melts and subdues the gazer is that of the soul and the affections, uniting the awe and mystery of that mother's miraculous allotment with the irrepressible love, the unutterable tenderness, of young maternity,—Heaven's crowning miracle with Nature's holiest and sweetest instinct. And their pale Magdalens, holy with the look of sins forgiven,—how the divine beauty of their penitence sinks into the heart! Do we not feel that the only real deformity is sin, and that goodness evermore hallows and sanctifies its dwelling-place? When the soul is at rest, when the passions and desires are all attuned to the divine harmony,—
do we not read the placid significance thereof in the human countenance? ‘I have seen,’ said Charles Lamb, ‘faces upon which the dove of ’Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-ordered law,The haunted palace, by Edgar A. Poe.
