Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/220

 It is the quality of the spiritual and invisible part, then—the peculiar characteristics of mind and heart which the face discloses—that makes all the difference among people on earth in respect to beauty. And among cultivated Christian people that face will always be thought most beautiful, which expresses most of the higher and nobler qualities of humanity. There is no beauty in the human countenance apart from the mental beauty—the lofty thoughts, the sweet affections, the tender sympathies, the noble purpose which it reveals. This is confessed by all the great masters in literature. Thus Milton says of Adam and Eve while in their primitive innocence:

And Spenser, with the insight of a true poet, and clearly recognizing the influence of the soul upon the body even to the extent disclosed in Swedenborg's pneumatology, sings:

And in a like strain sing Addison and Young, Shakspeare and Goethe, Byron and Coleridge, and all the great masters in this art.

Every one knows, too, that a good artist is able to express all the passions and emotions of the heart in the faces of the figures he paints or carves: and can express them with such precision that people of some discern-