What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin!
It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed
by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men--
has no substantive deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading
whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.
Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least
palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist
among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible.
From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has
been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances,
has the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary.
How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart,
when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate
White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue.
It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect
of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor
lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge
of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here.
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