WHERE IS THE BEAUTIFUL?
Where is the Beautiful? in these sharp airs?These skies from which God sends no pleasure down,These hills with sad monotony of curve,Fixed by long Winter in perpetual frown?
Or in these men and women, fashioned mostIn features of an undelightful mould,Ardent in all that shows self paramount,Where self should melt and mingle, hard and cold.
With pitiless remembrance of the faultsThat God and Time pass over leniently,These on a brother's blemishes conferThe demon's gift of immortality.
I have seen saintly blood that, long congealed,At some prayer-hallowed festival would meltFrom deathless virtue in the heart it fed,And latent love, forgotten ne'er, once felt.
