Beauty in the Country 



handsome is hardly regarded by the outside world as 

 legitimate. But even with all these advantages 

 beauty in the fullest sense does not appear regularly. 

 Few indeed are those families that can boast of more 

 than one. It is the best of all boasts; it is almost 

 as if the Immortals had especially favoured their 

 house. Beauty has no period; it comes at intervals, 

 unexpected! it cannot be fixed. No wonder the 

 earth is at its feet. 



The fisherman's daughter ere now has reached 

 very high in the scale of beauty. Hardihood is the 

 fisherman's talent by which he wins his living from 

 the sea. Tribal in his ways, his settlements are 

 almost exclusive, and his descent pure. The wind 

 washed by the sea enriches his blood, and of labour 

 he has enough. Here are the same constant factors; 

 the stationary home keeping the family intact, the 

 out-door life, the air, the sea, the sun. Refinement 

 is absent, but these alone are so powerful that now 

 and then beauty appears. The lovely Irish girls, 

 again : their forefathers have dwelt on the mountain- 

 side since the days of Fingal, and all the hardships 

 of their lot cannot destroy the natural tendency to 

 shape and enchanting feature. Without those con- 

 stant factors beauty cannot be, but yet they will not 

 alone produce it. There must be something in the 

 blood which these influences gradually ripen. If it 

 is not there centuries are in vain; but if it is there 

 then it needs these conditions. Erratic, meteor-like 

 beauty ! for how many thousand years has man been 

 your slave! Let me repeat, the sentiment at the 

 sight of a perfect beauty is as much amazement as 

 admiration. It so draws the heart out of itself as 

 to seem like magic. 



She walks, and the very earth smiles beneath her 

 189 



