higher up between. But the master of the house would point out how, in that case, a fine taste would have been pained by the inevitable sense of contrast between the genial mildness of the two Teutonic faces, and the severe and scornful melancholy of the poet of the Inferno. The face of the Italian poet, as being so different in kind, must either be reluctantly omitted, he would say, or transferred by itself to the other side of the room. Unless, indeed, with a view to satisfy the claims both of degree and of kind, Shakspeare were to be placed alone over the mantel-piece, and Dante and Goethe in company on the opposite wall, where, there being but two, the contrast would be rather agreeable than otherwise! On the whole, however, and without prejudice to new arrangements in the course of future decorations, he is content that it should be as it is.

Let us

And so, reader, for the present are we. enter together, then, if it seems worth while, the room of this imaginary dilettante during his absence; let us turn the key in the lock, so that he may not come in to interrupt us; and let us look for a little time at the two masks he has provided for us over the mantelpiece, receiving such reflections as they may suggest. Doubtless we have often looked at the two masks before; but that matters little.

As we gaze at the first of the two masks, what is it that we see? A face full in contour, of good oval shape, the individual features small in proportion to

the entire countenance, the greater part of which is made up of an ample and rounded forehead, and a somewhat abundant mouth and chin. The general impression is that rather of rich, fine, and very mobile tissue, than of large or decided bone. This, together with the length of the upper lip, and the absence of any set expression, imparts to the face an air of lax and luxurious calmness. It is clearly a passive face rather than an active face; a face across which moods may pass and repass, rather than a face grooved and charactered into any one permanent show of relation towards the outer world. Placed beside the mask of Cromwell, it would fail to impress, not only as being less massive and energetic, but also as being in every way less marked and determinate. It is the face, we repeat, of a literary man; one of those faces which depend for their power to impress less on the sculptor's favourite circumstance of distinct osseous form, than on the changing hue and aspect of the living flesh. And yet it is, even in form, quite a peculiar face. Instead of being, as in the ordinary thousand and one portraits of Shakspeare, a mere general face which anybody or nobody might have had, the face in the mask (and the singular portrait in the first folio edition* of the poet's works corroborates it) is a face

The

* Published in 1623, seven years after the poet's death. editors were John Heminge and Henry Condell, his fellow actors. The portrait is on the title-page, on a rectangular ground, mea

which every call-boy about the Globe theatre must have carried about with him in his imagination, without any trouble, as specifically Mr. Shakspeare's face. In complexion, as we imagine it, it was rather fair than dark; and yet not very fair either, if we are to believe Shakspeare himself,—

"But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity."

Sonnet 62.

a passage, however, in which, from the nature of the mood in which it was written, we are to suppose exaggeration for the worse. In short, the face of Shakspeare, so far as we can infer what it was from the homely Stratford bust, was a genuine and even comely, but still unusual English face, distinguished by a kind of ripe intellectual fulness in the general outline, comparative smallness in the individual features, and a look of gentle and humane repose.

Goethe's face is different.

The whole size of the

head is perhaps less, but the proportion of the face to

suring 7.5×6.3 inches, and on the opposite page the following lines by Ben Jonson appear:

"This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Grauer had a strife
With Nature, to out-doo the life:
O, could he but haue drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was euer writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke

Not on his Picture, but his Booke.-B. I."

the head is greater, and there is more of that determinate form which arises from prominence and strength in the bony structure. The features are individually larger, and present in their combination more of that deliberate beauty of outline which can be conveyed with effect in sculpture. The expression, however, is also that of calm intellectual repose; and in the absence of harshness or undue concentration of the parts, one is at liberty to discover the proof that this also was the face of a man whose life was spent rather in a career of thought and literary effort than in a career of active and laborious strife. Yet the face, with all its power of fine susceptibility, is not so passive as that of Shakspeare. Its passiveness is more the passiveness of self-control, and less that of natural constitution; the susceptibilities pass and repass over a firmer basis of permanent character; the tremors among the nervous tissues do not reach to such depths of sheer nervous dissolution, but sooner make impact against the solid bone. The calm in the one face is more that of habitual softness and ease of humour: the calm in the other, more that of dignified, though tolerant self-composure. It would have been more easy, we think, to have taken liberties with Shakspeare in his presence, than to have attempted a similar thing in the presence of Goethe. The one carried himself with the air of a man often diffident of himself, and whom, therefore, a foolish or impudent stranger might very well mistake till he saw him roused; the other

wore, with all his kindness and blandness, a fixed stateliness of mien and look that would have checked undue familiarity from the first. Add to all this that the face of Goethe, at least in later life, was browner and more wrinkled; his hair more dark; his eye also, as we think, nearer the black and lustrous in species, if less mysteriously vague and deep; and his person perhaps the taller and more symmetrically made,*

THE HUMBLE-BEE.

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

B

URLY, dozing humble-bee,

Where thou art is clime for me.

Let them sail for Porto Rique,
Far-off heats through seas to seek;
I will follow thee alone,
Thou animated torrid-zone!
Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,
Let me chase thy waving lines;
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines,

* According to Mr. Lewes, in his "Life of Goethe," it is a mistake to fancy that Goethe was tall. He seemed taller than he really was.