Yes--'tis thus that we form to ourselves--incommunicably within our souls--what we choose to call Ideal Beauty--that is, a life-in-death image or Eidolon of a Being whose voice was once heard, and whose footsteps once wandered among the flowers of this earth. But it is a mistake to believe that such beauty as this can visit the soul only after the original in which it once breathed is no more. For as it can only be seen by profoundest passion--and the profoundest are the passions of Love, and Pity, and Grief--then why may not each and all of these passions--when we consider the constitution of this world and this life--be awakened in their utmost height and depth by the sight of living beauty, as well as by the memory of the dead? To do so is surely within "the reachings of our souls,"--and if so, then may the virgin beauty of his daughter, praying with folded hands and heavenward face when leaning in health on her father's knees, transcend even the ideal beauty which shall afterwards visit his slumbers nightly, long years after he has laid her head in the grave. If by ideal beauty you mean a beauty beyond whatever breathed, and moved, and had its being on earth--then we suspect that not even "that inner eye which is the bliss of solitude" ever beheld it; but if you merely mean by ideal beauty, that which is composed of ideas, and of the feelings attached by nature to ideas, then, begging your pardon, my good sir, all beauty whatever is ideal--and you had better begin to study metaphysics.