202 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 ixvv excel]i!\icr, 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 meaninoicss. Add to this that the 



O 



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, — 



wlio.se margin fades 

 For ever and for ever as I move. 



In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely 



