But, some may say, the eyes have emotion inasmuch as they betray it by the waxing and contracting of the pupils.  It is, however, the rarest thing, this opening and narrowing under any influences except those of darkness and light.  It does take place exceptionally; but I am doubtful whether those who talk of it have ever really been attentive enough to perceive it.  A nervous woman, brown-eyed and young, who stood to tell the news of her own betrothal, and kept her manners exceedingly composed as she spoke, had this waxing and closing of the pupils; it went on all the time like a slow, slow pulse.  But such a thing is not to be seen once a year.

Moreover, it is—­though so significant—­hardly to be called expression.  It is not articulate.  It implies emotion, but does not define, or describe, or divide it.  It is touching, insomuch as we have knowledge of the perturbed tide of the spirit that must cause it, but it is not otherwise eloquent.  It does not tell us the quality of the thought, it does not inform and surprise as with intricacies.  It speaks no more explicit or delicate things than does the pulse in its quickening.  It speaks with less division of meanings than does the taking of the breath, which has impulses and degrees.

No, the eyes do their work, but do it blankly, without communication.  Openings into the being they may be, but the closed cheek is more communicative.  From them the blood of Perdita never did look out.  It ebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, her talk.  It was hiding in her paleness, and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison.  It leapt and looked, at a word.  It was conscious in the fingers that reached out flowers.  It ran with her.  It was silenced when she hushed her answers to the king.  Everywhere it was close behind the doors—­everywhere but in her eyes.

How near at hand was it, then, in the living eyelids that expressed her in their minute and instant and candid manner!  All her withdrawals, every hesitation, fluttered there.  A flock of meanings and intelligences alighted on those mobile edges.

Think, then, of all the famous eyes in the world, that said so much, and said it in no other way but only by the little exquisite muscles of their lids.  How were these ever strong enough to bear the burden of those eyes of Heathcliff’s in “Wuthering Heights”?  “The clouded windows of Hell flashed a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out, however, was so dimmed and drowned—­” That mourning fiend, who had wept all night, had no expression, no proof or sign of himself, except in the edges of the eyelids of the man.

And the eyes of Garrick?  Eyelids, again.  And the eyes of Charles Dickens, that were said to contain the life of fifty men?  On the mechanism of the eyelids hung that fifty-fold vitality.  “Bacon had a delicate, lively, hazel eye,” says Aubrey in his “Lives of Eminent Persons.”  But nothing of this belongs to the eye except the colour.  Mere brightness the eyeball has or has not, but so have many glass beads:  the liveliness is the eyelid’s.  “Dr Harvey told me it was like the eie of a viper.”  So intent and narrowed must have been the attitude of Bacon’s eyelids.