by a tendency of blood to the head, which the tight-lacing must have assisted. It is also said that her eyes would have been good had they not been injured by near-sightedness, and that her peculiar smile had only a passing effect of superciliousness, and was really kind and truthful. She had what her school-mate Dr. O. W. Holmes described as “a long and flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange, sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother.”[1] Her hands were smooth and white, and she made such prominent use of them that she was charged by her critics — as was also charged upon Madame de Staël in respect to her arms — with making the most of her only point of beauty.
The total effect was undoubtedly that of personal plainness; and the consciousness of this fact was no doubt made more vivid to her by the traditions and remains of her mother’s beauty, and by the fact that this quality was transmitted in even an enhanced form to her own younger sister Ellen, whom she reared and educated. Ellen Fuller, afterwards the wife of Ellery Channing, the poet, was in person and character one of the most attractive of women. She had a Madonna face, a broad brow, exquisite coloring, and the most noble and ingenuous expression, mingled, in her sister Margaret’s phrase, with “the look of an appeal-
- ↑ Atlantic Monthly, xxiii. 116.
