He asked if there did not lurk in the fancy, if not in our atoms, a persuasion that complexion, like features, voice, gait, typified and emblazoned personal traits of their possessors, if the rhetoric of morals and religion did not revel in like distinctions. "Handsome is that handsome does." Beauty was the birthright of all, if not their inheritance. It was shame that brought deformity into the world. Every child accused, he knew not whom, for any blemish of his. "Why not mine the happy star, too?" Still some trait was insinuated into the least favored, and stamped upon the embryonic clay. Ebony, alabaster, indigo, vermilion, the pigments were all mingled as purity or passion decreed. Types were persistent, family features standing strong for centuries and perpetuating themselves from generation to generation. Place the portraits of a long line of ancestors on the walls, one's features were all there, with the slight variations arising from intermarriage, degrees of culture, calling, climate. "Our faces were our coats of arms." "Eyes were most characteristic. These played the prime parts in life,--eyes and voice. Eyes were a civility and a kingdom: voice a fortune. There was a culture, a fate in them, direful, divine." And he quoted, without naming the author:-- "Black eyes, in your dark orbs doth lie My ill or happy destiny; If with clear looks you me behold, You give me wine and mounts of gold; If you dart forth disdainful rays, To your own dye you turn my days; Black eyes, in your dark orbs doth dwell My bane or bliss, my heaven or hell." Then added, significantly:-- Ask you _my_ preference, what their hue? Surely the safe, celestial blue. He said: "Voice classified us. The harmonious voice tells of the harmonious soul. Millions of fiends are evoked in a breath by an irritated one. A gentle voice converts the Furies into Muses. The highest saint is not he who strives the most violently, but he upon whom goodness sits gracefully, whose strength is gentleness, duty loved, because spontaneous, and who wastes none of his power in effort; his will being one and above temptation. True love says, 'Come to my embrace, you are safer with me than you were with yourself, since I am wise above knowledge, and tasting of the apple.' The sequel is bliss and peace. But after fascination comes sorrow, remorse. The touch of the demonized soul is poison. Read Swedenborg's Hells, he added, and beware of demonized eyes!" I never saw any one who seemed to purify words as Mr. Alcott does; with him nothing is common or unclean.