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
In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely used in the
quickly-perishing flowers of some frail plants; while a few living
things of free and buoyant motions, like birds and butterflies,
have been touched on the wings with the celestial tint only to make
them more aërial in appearance. Only in man, removed from the gross
materialism of nature, and in whom has been developed the highest
faculties of the mind, do we see the full beauty and significance of
the blue eye—the eye, that is, without the interposing cloud of dark
pigment covering it. In the recently-published biography of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, the author says of him: “His eyes were large, dark blue,
brilliant, and full of varied expression. Bayard Taylor used to say
that they were the only eyes he ever knew to flash fire.... While he
was yet at college, an old gypsy woman, meeting him suddenly in a
woodland path, gazed at him and asked, ‘Are you a man or an angel?’”
Mrs. Hawthorne says in one of her letters quoted in the book: “The
flame of his eyes consumed compliment, cant, sham, and falsehood; while
the most wretched sinners—so many of whom came to confess to him—met in
his glance such a pity and sympathy that they ceased to be afraid of
God and began to return to him.... _I never dared gaze at him, even I,
unless his lids were down_.”
I think we have, most of us, seen eyes like these—eyes which one rather
avoids meeting, because when met one is startled by the sight of a
naked human soul brought so near. One person, at least, I have known
to whom the above description would apply in every particular; a man
whose intellectual and moral nature was of the highest order, and who
perished at the age of thirty, a martyr, like the late Dr. Rabbeth, in
the cause of science and humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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