110 SPARKS FROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMER. 



with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eter- 

 nal drama." * 



The beauty of humanity is another sort of physical 

 beauty. It is bathed, however, and suffused and lighted, 

 in its full development, by beauty of soul. There is no 

 presence which mute and motionless speaks with such 

 subduing power as the human mien. In its different 

 moods, as terrible as the stormy sea, or as placid as the 

 summer lake, or fathomless and suggestive as the blue 

 depths of the sky. Here is my dark-eyed boy in his fourth 

 summer; look on him in sleep; in outline what a master- 

 work of the divine artist; but within the gracefully chis- 

 eled form is all the mystery and the beauty of life warm- 

 ing his tinted skin, throbbing visibly through all his 

 frame. * * * Now his lids are parted; those dark 

 eyes look out from the land of the spirit avenues to a 

 mysterious world a depth too deep for even imagina- 

 tion to explore. Oh, who has not gazed into those deep, 

 melting, trustful eyes of childhood, and tried to penetrate 

 their soft, bewitching, spiritual haze? There is a light 

 and warmth of heaven in them still, and I feel it, and 

 I sigh to think the fire of heaven is destined to be smoth- 

 ered by the ashes of a mortal life. I could worship as 

 well as love the boy, for I feel that he is yet a divinity. 



I know not whether the spiritual is so inseparably 

 blended with the material in man that it becomes impos- 

 sible to contemplate beauty of form apart from the beauty 

 of the informing spirit; but I am of the opinion that 

 the perfect human figure is the most beautiful blending 

 and interfusing of lines of beauty which nature has ever 

 produced. An ascetic theology may affect to despise the 



* Charlotte Cushman. 



