I am a very plain man in my personal appearance--_so_ plain that a common observer, if informed that there was a woman who had a fancy for my peculiar type, would wonder that I was not thankfully put to rest for life as a seeker after love--a second miracle of the kind being a very slender probability. It is not in beauty that the taste for beauty alone resides, however. In early youth my soul, like the mirror of Cydippe, retained, with enamored fidelity, the image of female loveliness copied in the clear truth of its appreciation, and the passion for it had become, insensibly, the thirst of my life, before I thought of it as more than an intoxicating study. To be loved--myself beloved--by a creature made in one of the diviner moulds of woman, was, however, a dream that shaped itself into waking distinctness at last, and from that hour I took up the clogging weight of personal disadvantages, to which I had hitherto unconsciously been chained, and bore it heavily in the race which the well-favored ran as eagerly as I. I am not to recount, here, the varied experiences of my search, the world over, after beauty and its smile. It is a search on which all travelers are more than half bent, let them name as they please their professed errand in far countries. The coldest scholar in art will better remember a living face of a new cast of expression, met in the gallery of Florence, than the best work of Michael Angelo, whose genius he has crossed an ocean to study; and a fair shoulder crowded against the musical pilgrim, in the Capella Sistiera, will be taken surer into his soul's inner memory than the best outdoing of "the sky-lark taken up into heaven," by the ravishing reach of the _Miserere_. Is it not true?