Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/77

62 in our later judgment we find our standard changed, and refer back to them as the source of its enlargement,

Margaret was already familiar with several of the ideal heads of which we have spoken, and which bore the names of Beatrice, Rosalie, the Valentine, etc. Of these, as previously seen and studied, she says:—

"The calm and meditative cast of these pictures, the ideal beauty that shone through rather than in them, and the harmony of colouring were as unlike anything else I saw, as the Vicar of Wakefield to Cooper's novels. I seemed to recognise in painting that self-possessed elegance, that transparent depth, which I most admire in literature."

With these old favourites she classes, as most beautiful among those how shown, the Evening Hymn, the Italian Shepherd Boy, Edwin, Lorenzo and Jessica.

“The excellence of these pictures is subjective, and even feminine. They tell us the painter's ideal of character: a graceful repose, with a fitness for moderate action; a capacity of emotion, with a habit of reverie. Not one of these beings is in a state of épanchement. Not one is, or perhaps could be, thrown off its equipaise. They are, even the suftest, characterised by entire though unconscious self-possession."

The head called Beatrice was sometimes spoken of in those days as representing the Beatrice of Dante. Margaret finds in it nothing to suggest the. Divina Commedia.

“How fair, indeed, and not unmeet for a poet's love. But what she is, what she can be, it needs no Dante to discover. She is not a lustrous, bewitching beauty, neither is she a high and poetic one. She is not a concentrated perfume, nor a flowers nor & star. Yet