Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, June 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, June 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
Brown eyes express animal passions rather than intellect, and the
higher moral feelings. They are frequently equalled in their own
peculiar kind of eloquence by the brown or dark eyes in civilised
dogs. In animals there is, in fact, often an exaggerated eloquence of
expression. To judge from their eyes, caged cats and eagles in the
Zoological Gardens are all furred and feathered Bonnivards. Even in
the most intellectual of men the brown eye speaks more of the heart
than of the head. In the inferior creatures the black eye is always
keen and cunning or else soft and mild, as in fawns, doves, aquatic
birds, etc.; and it is remarkable that in man also the black eye—dark
brown iris with large pupil—generally has one or the other of these
predominant expressions. Of course, in highly-civilised communities,
individual exceptions are extremely numerous. Spanish and negro women
have wonderfully soft and loving eyes, while the cunning weasel-like
eye is common everywhere, especially amongst Asiatics. In high-caste
Orientals the keen, cunning look has been refined and exalted to an
expression of marvellous subtlety—the finest expression of which the
black eye is capable.
The blue eye—all blues and greys being here included—is, _par
excellence_, the eye of intellectual man; that outer warm-colored
pigment hanging like a cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its
most spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite blown away
are we able to look into the soul, forgetting man’s kinship with
the brutes. When one is unaccustomed to it from always living with
dark-eyed races, the blue eye seems like an anomaly in nature, if not a
positive blunder; for its power of expressing the lower and commonest
instincts and passions of our race is comparatively limited; and in
cases where the higher faculties are undeveloped it seems vacant and
meaningless. Add to this that the ethereal blue color is associated
in the mind with atmospheric phenomena rather than with solid matter,
inorganic or animal. It is the hue of the void, expressionless sky; of
shadows on far-off hill and cloud; of water under certain conditions of
the atmosphere, and of the unsubstantial summer haze,
Whose margin fades
Forever and forever as I move.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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