A mighty phantom has answered my spell: an awful shape clouds the magic mirror! Reader, before me I behold the earthly tabernacle of Northangerland’s unsounded soul! There he stands: what a vessel to be moulded from the coarse clay of mortality! What a plant to spring from the rank soil of human existence! And the vessel is without flaw: polished, fresh, and bright from the last process of the maker. The flower has sprung up to mature beauty, but not a leaf is curled, not a blossom faded. This portrait was taken ere the lights and shadows of twenty-five summers had fallen across the wondrous labyrinth of Percy’s path through life. At this moment a gleam of sunlight, real deep gold in hue, comes through the kindled window-panes, and falls richly and serenely on the picture. It is a softened glory, for the sun is far west and its amber rays shed inexpressible tranquillity wherever they descend. How sweetly they sleep on that brow! and on those Ionic features! Percy! Percy! never was humanity fashioned in a fairer mould. The eye follows delighted all those classic lines of face and form: not one unseemly curvature or angle to disturb the general effect of so much refined regularity; all appears carved in ivory. The grossness of flesh and blood will not suit its statuesque exactness and speckless polish. A feeling of fascination comes over me while I gaze on that Phidian nose defined with such beautiful precision; that chin and mouth chiselled to such elaborate perfection; that high, pale forehead, not bald as now, but yet not shadowed with curls, for the clustering hair is parted back, gathered in abundant wreaths on the temples and leaving the brow free for all the gloom and glory of a mind that has no parallel to play over the expanse of living marble which its absence reveals. The expression in this picture is somewhat pensive, composed, free from sarcasm except the fixed sneer of the-lip and the strange deadly glitter of the eye whose glance—a mixture of the keenest scorn and deepest thought—curdles the spectator’s blood to ice. In my opinion this head embodies the most vivid ideas we can conceive of Lucifer, the rebellious archangel: there is such a total absence of human feeling and sympathy; such a cold frozen pride; such a fathomless power of intellect; such passionless yet perfect beauty—not breathing and burning, full of tightening blood and fiery thought and feeling like that of some others whom our readers will recollect,—but severely studied, faultlessly refined, as cold and hard and polished and perfect as the most priceless brilliant. And in his eye there is a shade of something, words cannot express what. The sight may catch, but not fix it. A gleam, scarcely human, dark and fiend-like, it steals away under the lash, quivers sometimes with the mysterious tremor of a northern light, fixes stedfastly on some luckless bystander, who shrinks from the supernatural aspect, and then is all at once quenched.