I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she
sings.
He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.
He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto.
Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
lost bride and her groom.
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.