"Rise up, rise up, Xarifa, lay your golden cushion down!" And then we two, my dear sir, must have a contest at chess--at which, if you beat us, we shall leave our bed at midnight, and murder you in your sleep. "But where," murmurs Matilda, "are we going?" To Oresthead, love--and Elleray--for you must see a sight these sweet eyes of thine never saw before--a SUNSET. We have often wondered if there be in the world one woman indisputably and undeniably the most beautiful of all women--or if, indeed, our first mother were "the loveliest of her daughters, Eve." What human female beauty is all men feel--but few men know--and none can tell--further than that it is perfect spiritual health, breathingly embodied in perfect corporeal flesh and blood, according to certain heaven-framed adaptations of form and hue, that by a familiar yet inscrutable mystery, to our senses and our souls express sanctity and purity of the immortal essence enshrined within, by aid of all associated perceptions and emotions that the heart and the imagination can agglomerate round them, as instantly and as unhesitatingly as the faculties of thought and feeling can agglomerate round a lily or a rose, for example, the perceptions and emotions that make them--by divine right of inalienable beauty--the Royal Families of Flowers. This definition--or description rather--of human female beauty, may appear to some, as indeed it appears to us, something vague; but all profound truths--out of the exact sciences--are something vague; and it is manifestly the design of a benign and gracious Providence that they should be so till the end of time--till mortality puts on immortality--and earth is heaven. Vagueness, therefore, is no fault in philosophy--any more than in the dawn of morning, or the gloaming of eve. Enough, if each clause of the sentence that seeks to elucidate a confessed mystery, has a meaning harmonious with all the meanings in all the other clauses--and that the effect of the whole taken together is musical--and a tune. Then it is Truth. For all Falsehood is dissonant--and verity is consent. It is our faith, that the souls of some women are angelic--or nearly so--by nature and the Christian religion; and that the faces and persons of some women are angelic, or nearly so--whose souls, nevertheless, are seen to be far otherwise--and, on that discovery, beauty fades or dies. But may not soul and body--spirit and matter--meet in perfect union at birth; and grow together into a creature, though of spiritual mould, comparable with Eve before the Fall? Such a creature--such creatures--may have been; but the question is--did you ever see one? We almost think that we have--but many long years ago; "She is dedde, Gone to her death-bedde All under the willow-tree." And it may be that her image in the moonlight of memory and imagination may be more perfectly beautiful than she herself ever was, when "Upgrew that living flower beneath our eye."