For Beauty is the most unforgettable thing in the world, and though of it a few perish, and the myriad dies unknowing and uncaring, beneath it the nations of men move as beneath their pilgrim star. Therefore he who adds to the beauty of the world is of the sons of God. He who destroys or debases beauty is of the darkness, and shall have darkness for his reward. The day will come when you will find a subtle enchantment in these names. They will bring you a lost music, a lost world, and imperishable beauty.
Empires become drifted sand, and the queens of great loveliness are dust on the wind.
They shall not come again, towered cities of sand, palaces built upon the sea, roses of beauty that blossomed for an hour on the wind that is ever silently and swiftly moving out of darkness and turning a sunlit wing and then silently and swiftly moving into darkness again. But the wind is changeless in divine continual advent, and the sunlit wing is that immortal radiance we call Beauty, which we see as the mirage hung upon the brows of Life. For wisdom reneweth herself in beauty. It will not suffice that you care for these beautiful old tales as one cares for a flower that one plucks by the wayside, that one gathers at whim and idly discards. It will not suffice to like them as we like something which amuses us for a moment, a fantasy at a theatre, a light air lightly played or a song lifting itself from twilights of silence, this painted idyll of what never was, this facile romance of the obvious or the impossible.