Volume I Part 19 (1/2)
ENCLOSURE
”Mademoiselle de Maupin,” petite edition, Charpentier, 2 vols; vol ii, page 12
”I aes;--the world in which I live is notof the social system by which I am surrounded
Never did Christ coan as Alcibiades or Phidias Never have I been to Golgotha to gather passion-flowers; and the deep river flowing froirdle about the world, has never bathed e 21: ”Venus ; for ly alone; and is a hter of the Christian disdain of form and matter”
”O ancient worlds! all thou didst revere is now despised; thine idols are overthrown in dust; gaunt anchorites clad in tattered rags, gory ers of the circuses, lie heaped upon the pedestals of thy Gods so co;--the Christ has enveloped the world in his winding sheet Beauty es 22, 23: ”Virginity, thou bitter plant, born upon a soil blood-moistened, whose wan and sickly flower opes painfully within the damp shadows of the cloister, under cold lustral rains;--rose without perfu with thorns,--thou hast replaced for us those fair and joyous roses, besprinkled with nard and Falernian, worn by the dancing girls of Sybaris”
”The antique world knew thee not, O fruitless flower!--never wert thou entwined within their garlands, replete with intoxicating perfuorous and healthy life, thou wouldst have been disdainfully trainity, mysticisht ae the world with icy tears and who,” etc, etc
TO REV WAYLAND D BALL
NEW ORLEANS, 1883
SECRET AFFINITIES (A PANTHEISTIC MADRIGAL) ”_Emaux et Camees--Enamels and Cameos_”
For three thousand years two blocks of marble in the pediment of an antique teround of the Attic heaven
Congealed in the same nacre, tears of those waves which weep for Venus,--two pearls deep-plunged in ocean's gulf, have uttered secret words unto each other;--
Bloo in the cool Generalife, beneath the spray of the ever-weeping fountain, two roses in Boabdil's time spake to each other hisper of leaves;--
Upon the cupolas of Venice, thite doves, rosy-footed, perched one May-ti on the nest where love makes itself eternal
Marble, pearl, rose, and dove--all dissolve, all pass away;--the pearl ht
Leaving each other, all atoms seek the deep Crucible to thicken that universal paste formed of the forms that are melted by God
By slow es to white flesh, the rosy flowers into rosy lips,--reain do the white doves coo within the hearts of young lovers; and the rare pearls re-form into teeth for the jewel-casket of woman's smile
And hence those syently warmed to know each other for sisters
Thus, docile to the summons of an aroma, a sunbeam, a colour, the atom flies to the atom as to the flower the bee
Then drea reveries in white temple pediments, of reveries in the deeps of the sea,--of blossom talk beside the clear-watered fountain,--
Of kisses and quivering of wings upon the doold; and the faithfulof love once ain love awakens frouely the Past is re-born; the perfuain in the sweetness of the pink h, the pearl recognizes its ohiteness;--upon the snizes its own coolness