This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1843 edition. Excerpt: ...or elevation of soul, have little to do with the fair countenance on which they are impressed. On the other hand, there are plain women sometimes met with in society, every movement of whose features is instinct with intelligence: who, from the genuine heartwarm smiles which piny about the mouth, the sweetly modulated voice, and the lighting up of an eye that looks as if it could " comprehend the universe," become perfectly beautiful to those who understand them, and still more so to those who live with them, and love them. Before such pretensions to beauty as these, how soon do the pink and white of a merely pretty face vanish into nothing! Yet, if the beauty of expression should be less popular amongst women, from the circumstance of its being less admired by men than that of mere form and complexion, they do well in this, as in every other disputed question of ultimate good, to look to the end. Men have been found whose admiration of beauty was so great, that they have actually married for that alone, content, for its sake, to dispense with the presence of mind. And what has been the end to them, or rather to the luckless beings whose misfortune it was to be the objects of their choice 1--A neglected aud degraded lot, imbittered by the fretfulness of disappointment on the part of their husbands; while, on the other hand, women, whose attractions have been of a more intellectual nature, have maintained their hold upon the affections of their companions, through life, even to the unlovely season of old age. But, in addition to the insufficiency of mere beauty, there is another cause why men are so frequently disappointed in selecting merely pretty wives. They have a habit of supposing that if a woman is pretty, and not very...