It is full of deep, tender, and earnest feeling. It is an eye, which looked on once, you long to look on again; it is an eye which will haunt your dreams—an eye which will give a color, in spite of you, to all your reveries. It is an eye which lies before you in your future, like a star in the mariner’s heaven; by it, unconsciously, and from force of deep soul habit, you take all your observations. It is meek and quiet; but it is full as a spring that gushes in flood; an Aphrodite and a Mercury—a Vaucluse and a Clitumnus.
The face is an angel face; no matter for curious lines of beauty; no matter for popular talk of prettiness; no matter for its angles, or its proportions; no matter for its color or its form—the soul is there, illuminating every feature, burnishing every point, hallowing every surface. It tells of honesty, sincerity and worth; it tells of truth and virtue—and you clasp the image to your heart as the received ideal of your fondest dreams.
The figure may be this or that, it may be tall or short, it matters nothing—the heart is there. The talk may be soft or low, serious or piquant—a free and honest soul is warming and softening it all. As you speak, it speaks back again; as you think, it thinks again (not in conjunction, but in the same sign of the Zodiac); as you love, it loves in return.
—It is the heart for a sister, and happy is the man who can claim such! The warmth that lies in it is not only generous, but religious, genial, devotional, tender, self-sacrificing, and looking heavenward.
A man without some sort of religion is, at best, a poor reprobate, the football of destiny, with no tie linking him to infinity, and the wondrous eternity that is begun with him; but a woman without it is even worse—a flame without heat, a rainbow without color, a flower without perfume!
A man may, in some sort, tie his frail hopes and honors with weak, shifting ground-tackle to business, or to the world; but a woman without that anchor which they call faith is adrift and a-wreck! A man may clumsily contrive a kind of moral responsibility out of his relations to mankind, but a woman in her comparatively isolated sphere, where affection and not purpose is the controlling motive, can find no basis for any system of right action, but that of spiritual faith.