The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 64: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SCHOOLMASTER 47 that sweet age when, with perhaps a slight precocity, the delicate outlines of girlhood’s form were softly rounding and eently developing into the more flowing ones of approaching womanhood. All these outlines indicated a justness of pro- portions which, while constituting her form the rarest model of expanding beauty, seemed to fulfil the idea which the sculptors of old sought to express and work out in their Parian effigies. Its willowy elasticity and youthful grace, its slenderness of waist and softly budding contours of bust, its sloping shoulders and gently arching neck, its rounded arms and its straightness of limbs, its exquisitely modelled hands and sculptured perfection of ankles and of feet, — all combined to render Isabella’s form the very incarnation of those rules of art which swayed the chisel or the pencil of the greatest masters when seeking to portray woman, in her loveliest form, through the medium of the marble or of the canvas. As for her countenance, to gaze thereon, it was not so much the perfect oval of that sweet face, nor the faultless regularity of the features, nor the deep blue eyes, so large and clear, with their thickly fringed lids, nor the classically pencilled brows, set upon the opals of the stainless forehead, nor the well-cut lips of coral redness, nor the teeth of Orient pearls which shone between, nor the transparency of the complexion, with the softest tint of the rose upon the cheeks, nor the rich abundance of glossy dark brown hair, shower- ingin ringlets upon her shoulders, —it was not all this assem- blage of charms which would most ravish and enchant the mind of theobserver. For there was something in the sweet pensiveness, and the holy melancholy, so to speak, of Isabella’s countenance which constituted the pure virginal charm that appealed to the sentiment and not to the sense, and which had to do with the soul as much as with the heart of the beholder, — a charm which no eye could fail to per- ceive, the influence of which no mind could help acknowl- edging, and yet which only the imagination could compre- hend, inasmuch as no pen can describe it. Indeed, it was what the perfume is to the rose, an essence apart from the beauty which attracts the eye; it was what the halo is to the angel, a light distinct from the heavenly beauty of the form itself. It was the inexpressible charm which makes one think, while gazing on such a face, that the soul itself is un- — GomiGaooks (C(O)