2 o 2 Idle Days in Patagonia . 



extremely numerous. Spanish and negro women 

 have wonderfully soft and loving eyes, while the 

 cunning weasel-like eye is common everywhere, 

 especially amongst Asiatics. In high-caste Orientals 

 the keen, cunning look has been refined and exalted 

 to an appearance of marvellous subtlety the finest 

 expression of which the black eye is capable. 



The blue eye all blues and greys being here in- 

 cluded is par excellence, the eye of intellectual man : 

 that outer warm-coloured pigment hanging like a 

 cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its most 

 spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite 

 blown away are we able to look into the soul, forget- 

 ting man's kinship with the brutes. "When one is un- 

 accustomed to it from always living with dark-eyed 

 races, the blue eye seems like an anomaly in nature, 

 if not a positive blunder ; for its power of express- 

 ing the lower and commonest instincts and passions 

 of our race is comparatively limited ; and in cases 

 where the higher faculties are undeveloped it seems 

 vacant and meaningless. Add to this that the 

 ethereal blue colour is associated in the mind with 

 atmospheric phenomena rather than with solid 

 matter, inorganic or animal. It is the hue of the 

 void, expressionless sky ; of shadows on far-off hill 

 and cloud ; of water under certain conditions of 

 the atmosphere, and of the unsubstantial summer 

 haze, 



whose margin fades 

 For ever and for ever as I move. 



In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely 



