There's nothing that allays an angry mind
So soon as a sweet beauty.
Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair!
For me her constant flame appears;
The garland she hath culled, I wear
On brows bald since my thirty years.
Ye veils that deck my loved one rare,
Fall, for the crowning triumph's nigh.
Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair!
And I, so plain a man am I!
The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness.
The essence of all beauty, I call love,
The attribute, the evidence, and end,
The consummation to the inward sense
Of beauty apprehended from without,
I still call love.
And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful.
Who doth not feel, until his failing sight
Faints into dimness with its own delight,
His changing cheek, his sinking heart confess,
The might—the majesty of Loveliness?
The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,
And, oh! the eye was in itself a Soul!
Thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty.
Her glossy hair was cluster'd o'er a brow
Bright with intelligence, and fair and smooth;
Her eyebrow's shape was like the aerial bow,
Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth,
Mounting, at times, to a transparent glow,
As if her veins ran lightning.
A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded,
A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.
Byron—Don Juan. Canto XV. St. 43.
She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless chimes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
| author = Byron
| work = She Walks in Beauty.
No todas hermosuras enamoran, que algunas
al^feran la vista, y no rinden la voluntad.
All kinds of beauty do not inspire love;
there is a kind which only pleases the sight,
but does not captivate the affections.
| author = Cervantes
| work = Don Quixote.
| place = II. 6.
Exceeding fair she was not; and yet fair
In that she never studied to be fairer
Than Nature made her; beauty cost her nothing,
Her virtues were so rare.
George Chapman—All Fools. Act I. Sc. 1.
I pour into the world the eternal streams
Wan prophets tent beside, and dream their
dreams.
John Vance Cheney—Beauty.
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{{Hoyt quote
| num = 15
| text = She is not fair to outward view
As many maidens be;
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smiled on me:
Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light.
Hartley Coleridge—Song.
Her gentle limbs did she undress,
And lay down in her loveliness.
Coleridge—Christabel. Pt. I. St. 24.
Beauty is the lover's gift.
Congreve—The Way of the World. Act II.
Sc. 2.
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{{Hoyt quote
| num = 15
| text = The ladies of St. James's!
They're painted to the eyes;
Their white it stays for ever,
Their red it never dies;
But Phyllida, my Phyllida!
Her colour comes and goes;
It trembles to a lily,—
It wavers to a rose.
Austin Dobson—At the Sign of the Lyre.
Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet,
Which once inflam'd my soul, and still inspires
my wit.
Dryden—Cymon and Iphigenia. L. 1.
When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts
the mind!
Dryden—Cymon and Iphigenia. L. 41.
She, though in full-blown flower of glorious
beauty,
Grows cold, even in the summer of her age.
Dryden—CEdipus. Act IV. Sc. 1.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for see„ ing.
Then beauty is its own excuse for being.
Emerson—The Rhodora.
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the
necessary.
Emerson—Essay. On the Poet.
