His courage and integrity had been abundantly rewarded; for Cleopatra's beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen the tame Grecian type.

The expression was of profound, gloomy, heavily revolving thought; a glance into her past life and present emergencies, while her spirit gathered itself up for some new struggle, or was getting sternly reconciled to impending doom.

In one view, there was a certain softness and tenderness,--how breathed into the statue, among so many strong and passionate elements, it is impossible to say.

Catching another glimpse, you beheld her as implacable as a stone and cruel as fire.
In a word, all Cleopatra--fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender, wicked, terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment--was kneaded into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet clay from the Tiber.

Soon, apotheosized in an indestructible material, she would be one of the images that men keep forever, finding a heat in them which does not cool down, throughout the centuries?
"What a woman is this!" exclaimed Miriam, after a long pause.