Beauty

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.

Airy, fairy Lilian.

 

Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,

 

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

 

O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright.

 

One-woman waterfall, she wears Her slow descent like a long cape And pausing, on the final stair Collects her motions into shape.

 

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

 

Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.

 

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.

 

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more.

 

Wearing all that weight Of learning lightly like a flower.

 

Sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

 

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.

 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

 

The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

 

Half light, half shade, She stood, a sight to make an old man young.

 

A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, And most divinely fair.

 

This thing you see, a bright-colored deceit, displaying all the many charms of art, with false syllogisms of tint and hue is a cunning deception of the eye…

Gem of all joy, jasper of jocundity.

 

London, thou art the flower of Cities all.

 

Love is he, radiant with great splendor, And speaks to us of Thee, O Most High.

 

Mrs. Stone found herself thinking that surely such beauty was a world of its own whose anarchy had a sort of godly license.

[ Reply when asked, as an Oxford undergraduate, why he was staring raptly at a pair of vases on his mantelpiece :] Oh, would that I could live up tomy blue china!