analysis, how many poems of delight, in order to say again, five or ten years after: "Oh, the angelic creature!" Nature was very generous in distributing attractions in the bodies of man and woman, and the short, sad day of our life always vanishes before we have been enabled to see all the forms of human beauty. But to the esthetic treasures of nature, man succeeded in adding those of art; and with the thousand artifices of garment and ornaments, we have added to our forms such and so many beauties that it is easier to imagine than to enumerate them. Perhaps I will some day attempt to write a "Physiology of Beauty," in which, if I do, I intend to point out the general laws which govern the esthetic world. Here I must only describe the confines where love and beauty meet and, in turn, kiss and fecundate each other. When the eye has love for a companion it finds a new world to contemplate in the cerulean star-thistle which our sweetheart interweaves for the first time in her golden hair, or in the crimson geranium which gives a magnificent relief to her raven locks; a naughty little muslin apron may become a new continent, and a glove, which too cruelly and too tightly squeezes a rosy little hand, may enclose in the nest of its little buttons of mother of pearl so many new beauties as to stir our senses or infuse an unknown voluptuousness into us. The man who loves a beautiful woman laughs compassionately at the polygamist pasha who needs a hundred women to find the hundred beauties of the human Venus; and the beautiful woman, in the arsenal of her garments, in the variety of her smiles, in the thousand undulations of her flexuous body, evokes before the eyes of her lover not a hundred, but a thousand women, all beautiful with a different beauty. Sight is the only sense which, in love, proceeds to effect moral and intellectual discoveries in the person beloved; and we not only contemplate to admire and to enjoy, but also to discover, by the flash of the eye and the throbbing of the facial muscles, how many affections, how many thoughts we can find in the one whom we intend to make ours forever. However, beauty is such a powerful tyrant in love that it forces us under its yoke and usurps the rights of the highest needs. A beautiful woman who is desired seldom seems to us frivolous and heartless, and the fascination of beauty may impel us to pardon every crime, to accept the most shameful compromises with our conscience, and may cause in us the most ridiculous and farcical hallucinations. However, this fault is not of the eyes, that see, but of the senses, that desire too ardently; and, above all, of nature, which has such a loving care of the forms in which germs are moulded into living bodies. Nature defends and protects the beautiful above everything else, perhaps because it is the crucible in which the good and the true are melted together.