Perhaps chance has played, in fame won by beauty, throughout the various ages of history, a greater part than it has played in every other kind of fame; for many of those whose beauty his-tory has kept on record escaped the flood of oblivion — which spares nothing and leaves nothing — only because their lives were joined to the life of some great man, or of an infatuated poet, or a masterly sculptor, or a gifted painter; though there has been no lack of beauties known for gifts or destinies that were worthy in themselves of rescuing their memory from extinction.

Were we to attempt to speak of absolute beauty, all speech would become impossible; for the wrappings of time may well have hidden, in some deserted village, or barren desert, or far-off isle, girls to whose beauty the beauty of those whose memory we still repeat today could never rise — those whose portraits we still pass in review, as the pen of a poet or the brush of a painter set them down — until the soul returns to those immortal passages of "Thomas Gray" in his "Elegy in a Country Churchyard":

"How many a gem of pure ray, serene, has lain hidden in the depths of the ocean; and how many a flower blooms far from all eyes, then sends forth its fragrance, wasted, into the wilderness of space!"

Between Truth and Imagination

Yet poetic souls — which are, we believe, the source of immor-tality for many of those whose names today awaken in the soul every image and token of beauty — were not always, indeed were rarely, critics and connoisseurs

of beauty in the familiar sense. How many a one of them was enamored of a woman in whom people saw no beauty, if beauty be measured by proportion and ratio; nay, how many a one of them loved a phantom that his imagination had fashioned, then gave the phantom a name, and perhaps gave it a body, choosing a woman — whoever she might be — much as "Don Quixote" did, the day he took for himself a girl, one of the daughters of his village, and bestowed upon her a noble and splendid name, "Dulcinea del Toboso." And since such a name is given only to noblewomen, there was in Don Quixote's imagination enough to raise up from the country girl that Dulcinea for whose sake he would do battle with champions if they did not acknowledge her beauty forthwith, and humbled!

One of those restless poetic souls once cried out, as he surveyed the record of his life so crowded with adventures: "Where is that woman who was the object of my adventures? It seems to me she was not one but a hundred! And my soul, which soared on high, was never touched by any one of them." And who knows — perhaps every one of those hun-dred was, at the given moment, the most beautiful woman the earth bore; and perhaps our poet gathered up in her, by his imagination, all the beauty of which he dreamed.

History has preserved many of the names of those beauties. We think we need not go back and retell the tidings of Cleopatra, who contrived to return from her exile in Syria to Alexandria, where Julius Caesar was — and behold, she steps forth before

him from a rolled-up carpet; and behold, Caesar, the soldier of hardened heart, is dazzled by her burning beauty, by the perpetual seething movement of her spirit, and by the tone of her voice, which could give utterance to the subtlest stirrings in a correct Latin made lovelier still by the accent of the sweet Greek tongue, Cleopatra's native language.

What is beyond doubt is that Cleopatra's ambition, which knew no bounds, had a telling effect upon the history of the whole Roman Empire. It was she who tempted Julius Caesar toward kingship, and she who drove Antony after him to the urge to seize power for himself alone, without his two colleagues, until she brought him to defeat upon the face of the waters in the famous battle of Actium, and at the last drove him to suicide.

"Pascal" spoke truly when he said in the "Pensées": had Cleopatra's nose been a little shorter than it was, the face of the whole world would have changed. But what can we do, when her nose was innocent of all shortness — indeed it was, and remains, proverbial for the beauty of the nose that descends in one line with the forehead, the nose still described to this day, in the lexicon of beauty, as the Greek nose?!

What power went forth from that woman's beauty? And what cunning was mingled with her magic? She dazzled Antony the day she came gliding to him in her ship, as though it bore all the luxury of the earth, reclining in a silken bower, with handmaids about her in gauzy robes like the waves of the sea, to mimic its goddesses, and boys who seemed, every one of them, "Cupid," the god of love, with his light and giddy wings! What power went forth from that woman's beauty? And what cunning was mingled with her magic, in the days when

she would roam the quarters of Alexandria with Antony at her side — one of the three rulers