" Yet, as a whole, the Rhine maidens seem to have won his
admiration:
"What characteristic faces among the lowest classes! On the west shore
of the Rhine the girls have very delicate features, indicating
amiability rather than intelligence; the noses are mostly Greek, the
face very oval and artistically symmetrical, the hair brown; I did not
see a single blonde. The complexion is soft, delicate, with more white
than red; melancholy rather than sanguine. The Frankfort girls, on the
other hand, have in common a sisterly trait--the character of German,
manly, sad earnestness which we often find in our quondam free
cities, and which toward the east gradually merges into a gentle
softness. Characteristic are the faces of all the Frankfort girls:
intellectual or beautiful few of them; the noses mostly Greek, often
snub-noses; the dialect I did not like."
The English type of beauty appears to have especially won his
approval. "When she spoke it sounded like the whispering of angels,"
he says of an Englishwoman, "as pretty as a picture," whom he met.
Elsewhere he says, laconically: "On the 24th I arrived at Mainz with
the steamer, in company with twenty to thirty English men and women.
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