[10]
MR HILARY
Rather to bear and forbear, Mr Cypress--a maxim which you perhaps
despise. Ideal beauty is not the mind's creation: it is real beauty,
refined and purified in the mind's alembic, from the alloy which
always more or less accompanies it in our mixed and imperfect nature.
But still the gold exists in a very ample degree. To expect too
much is a disease in the expectant, for which human nature is not
responsible; and, in the common name of humanity, I protest against
these false and mischievous ravings. To rail against humanity for not
being abstract perfection, and against human love for not realising
all the splendid visions of the poets of chivalry, is to rail at the
summer for not being all sunshine, and at the rose for not being
always in bloom.
MR CYPRESS
Human love! Love is not an inhabitant of the earth. We worship him as
the Athenians did their unknown God: but broken hearts are the martyrs
of his faith, and the eye shall never see the form which phantasy
paints, and which passion pursues through paths of delusive beauty,
among flowers whose odours are agonies, and trees whose gums are
poison.[11]
MR HILARY
You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who
does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels
with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.
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