"Needless to say, Zenobia and Miriam share this morally suspect physical
lushness. Miriam's portrait is 'the portrait of a beautiful woman, such as
one sees only two or three, if even so many, in all a lifetime; so beautiful,
that she seemed to get into your consciousness and memory, and could
never afterwards be shut out, but haunted your dreams, for pleasure or for
pain, holding your inner realm as a conquered territory, though without
deigning to make herself at home there'. 33 Zenobia is endowed with
comparable ch.arms. On first seeing her, the narrator Coverdale says, 'I
know not well how to express that the native glow of coloring in her
cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was
visible of her full bust - in a word, her womanliness incarnated -
compelled me to sometimes to dose my eyes, as if it were not quite the
privilege of modesty to gaze at her'. 34 At one point in The Marble Faun,
Hawthorne glosses the distinction that he has been reiterating between the beautiful, with its immediate appeal to the senses, and the more cerebral pleasures of the sublime by observing (of a superlative wine) that 'like whatever else is superlatively good, it was perhaps better appreciated in the memory, than by present consciousness'. 35 Zenobia and Miriam, who appeal too directly to present consciousness, are slated for a marmoreal reconstruction that will correct this problem."