Beautiful Sloped Quotes

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death’s note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.

Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains...

That is the earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets, and winds, and birds

In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat of the sun, the twinkling of the stars. Our human brain searched for an answer, and the conclusion was that it all must be caused by something greater than ourselves - this, of course, sprouted the earliest seeds of religion. This theory is certainly reflected in faery lore. In the beautiful sloping hills of Connemara in Ireland, for example, faeries were believed to have been just as beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant as the world around them. But in the Scottish Highlands, with their dark, brooding mountains and eerie highland lakes, villagers warned of deadly water-kelpies and spirit characters that packed a bit more punch.

I am not delicate. I am skinny dipping at 2am; I am dancing naked under the full moon and playing in the mud. I am the reverberating echoes of a curse word ricocheting off the steeply sloping mountain you thought I couldn’t climb; I am bare skin in the deepest depths of winter; I am the song of courage, and the melody of freedom you long to sing. I am a fearless mother. I am a passionate lover; a devoted friend. I am the healer, the witch, the nurturing of your wounds. I am the heat of a wildfire, the rage of a storm. I am strong. Delicate things are pretty-cute, even. But I am not delicate. I am wild, fierce and unpredictable. I am breathtaking. I am beautiful. I am sacred.

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword. She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light.

In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…

I’m happy. But some beauty is nonesuch - The gently sloping path across the wood, The wretched bridge that’s just a little skewed And that, for which, I won’t be waiting much.

Like how stars might sound. Or moons But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It's a sound like one planet singing to another, high stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but all weaving together in a rope of sound that's sad but not sad and slow but not slow and all singing one word. One word.

Soft sun shone down on a misty cathedral at the opposite end of a football-field length courtyard. The cathedral had a long pointed tower with beautiful rose and ivory stained glass windows. Pink-petal flowers and deep green ivy climbed the stones from the ground to it’s roof. A large fountain stood in the middle of the courtyard with water falling from several lion’s heads. Between the misty air and rolling slope of the earth, the grounds reminded me of a long lost fairy tale.

He smiled his shy smile at her as he went into the yard. Anne took the memory of it with her when she went to her room that night and sat for a long while at her open window, thinking of the past and dreaming of the future. Outside the Snow Queen was mistily white in the moonshine; the frogs were singing in the marsh beyond Orchard Slope. Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.

You’re not like any man I’ve ever known,” she said. “You’re not even someone I could have dreamed. You’re like someone from a fairy story written in a language I don’t even know.” “The prince, I hope.” “No, you’re the dragon, a beautiful wicked dragon.” Her voice turned wistful. “How could anyone have a normal everyday life with you?” Cam took her in a safe, firm grip and lowered her to the mattress. “Maybe you’ll be a civilizing influence on me.” He bent over the slope of her breast, kissing it through the muslin veil of her gown. “Or maybe you’ll get a taste for the dragon.” He found the bud of her nipple, wet the cotton with his mouth, until the tender flesh pricked up against his tongue. “I th-think I already have.” She sounded so perturbed that he laughed. “Then lie still,” he whispered, “while I breathe fire on you.

Eccolo!” he exclaimed. At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. “Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.” She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her…

At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away one's breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy.

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

One of Francie's favorite stores was the one which sold nothing but tea, coffee, and spices. It was an exciting place of rows of lacquered bins and strange, romantic, exotics odors. There were a dozen scarlet coffee bins with adventurous words written across the front in black China ink: Brazil! Argentine! Turkish! Java! Mixed Blend! The tea was in smaller bins: beautiful bins with sloping covers. They read: Oolong! Formosa! Orange Pekoe! Black China! Flowering Almond! Jasmine! Irish Tea! The spices were in miniature bins behind the counter. Their names marches in a row across the shelves: cinnamon-- cloves-- ginger-- all-spice-- ball nutmeg--curry-- peppercorns-- sage-- thyme-- marjoram.

She has built her whole life on the foundation of beauty: each chiseled plane, each sloping dimple, each soft curve as crucial as keystones in the cathedral of her body.

Aline found herself walking quickly, almost running, to her favorite place by the river, where a wildflower meadow sloped down to tall grasses alive with meadow-brown and marbled-white butterflies.

At ten, she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave away to inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart. To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life, than a beauty from her cradle can ever imagine.

The Single Perspective Instinct We find simple ideas very attractive. We enjoy that moment of insight, we enjoy feeling we really understand or know something. And it is easy to take off down a slippery slope, from one attention-grabbing simple idea to a feeling that this idea beautifully explains, or is the beautiful solution for, lots of other things. The world becomes simple. All problems have a single cause—something we must always be completely against. Or all problems have a single solution—something we must always be for. Everything is simple. There’s just one small issue. We completely misunderstand the world. I call this preference for single causes and single solutions the single perspective instinct. For example, the simple and beautiful idea of the free market can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems have a single cause—government interference—which we must always oppose; and that the solution to all problems is to liberate market forces by reducing taxes and removing regulations, which we must always support. Alternatively, the simple and beautiful idea of equality can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems are caused by inequality, which we should always oppose; and that the solution to all problems is redistribution of resources, which we should always support.

She could not say why these rather inconspicuous green slopes had so touched her heart, when along the railway line there were mountains, lakes, the sea at times even clouds dyed in sentimental colors. But perhaps their melancholy green, and the melancholy evening shadows of the ridges across them, had brought on the pain. Then too, they were small, well-groomed slopes with deeply shaded ridges, not nature in the wild; and the rows of rounded tea bushes looked like flocks of gentle green sheep.

But the chapel, that will never be prosaic. Those who have seen it outlined against the sunset or the full moon, those who have seen its sloping leaded roof-top glisten after a shower of rain, those who have looked down upon the world from its summit, all those who have seen these things will remember the poetry that it has taught them. And while each man changes from year to year, going through the continual changes that make a lifetime, the chapel remains always the same. When the rest of Cambridge is crumbling and in ruins, the chapel will still be standing, the last to fall to time as it is the last to fall to climbers.

Each time Nate saw her, Elisa’s beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they’d broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost aggressive good health. The power of her beauty, Nate had once decided, came from its ability to constantly reconfigure itself. When he thought he’d accounted for it, filed it away as a dead fact—pretty girl—she turned her head or bit her lip, and like a children’s toy you shake to reset, her prettiness changed shape, its coordinates altered: now it flashed from the elegant contours of her sloping brow and flaring cheekbone, now from her shyly smiling lips.

I saw the great sparkling orbs of his eyes, the tiny red veins that reached for the dark centers, that warm hand burning my cold hunger as he guided me to a chair. And then all around me I saw faces blazing, faces rising in the smoke of the lamps, in the shimmer of the burning stove, a wonderland of colors on canvases surrounding us beneath the small, sloped roof, a blaze of beauty that pulsed and throbbed.

Dear Stephen,’ he begins. ‘This is a difficult letter to write, but I know it will be a great deal more difficult to read. I will come straight to it. I believe you are in the early stages of dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s.’ Elizabeth can hear her heart beating through her chest. Who on earth has chosen to shatter their privacy this way? Who even knows? Her friends? Has one of them written? They wouldn’t dare, not without asking. Not Ibrahim, surely? He might dare. ‘I am not an expert, but it is something I have been looking into. You are forgetting things, and you are getting confused. I know full well what you will say – “But I’ve always forgotten things. I’ve always been confused!” – and you are right, of course, but this, Stephen, is of a different order. Something is not right with you, and everything I read points in just one direction.’ ‘Stephen,’ says Elizabeth, but he gently gestures for hush. ‘You must also know that dementia points in just one direction. Once you start to descend the slope, and please believe me when I say you have started, there is no return. There may be footholds here and there, there may be ledges on which to rest, and the view may still be beautiful from time to time, but you will not clamber back up.’ ‘Stephen, who wrote you this letter?’ Elizabeth asks. Stephen holds up a finger, asking her to be patient a few moments more. Elizabeth’s fury is decreasing. The letter is something she should have written to him herself. This should not have been left to a stranger. Stephen starts

Suffice it to say that [Everest] has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen, and that all the talk of an easy snow slope is a myth.… My darling this is a thrilling business altogether, I can’t tell you how it possesses me, and what a prospect it is. And the beauty of it all! George Leigh Mallory, in a letter to his wife,  June 28, 1921

For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the cold slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.

Sometimes you lie, Forest. Sometimes its the right thing to do." "I don't believe that, Ben." "And why is that?" "Because it always catches up with you." "It doesn't, not always." "It does." "Bullshit." "It's the truth, Ben." "No, Forest, it's another kind of lie. If Lizzie draws you a picture of a catfish and it looks like a big hairy turd, what do you tell her? That it looks like shit? That you could draw a better fucking catfish with a crayon up your asshole? No, Forest, you tell her it's the most beautiful catfish you ever saw, don't you? Of course you do. Truth's a slippery slope sometimes.

The weeks up there were almost the most beautiful in my life. I breathed the pure, clear air, drank the icy water from streams and watched the herds of goats grazing on the steep slopes, guarded by dark-haired, musing goatherds. At times I heard storms resound through the valley and saw mists and clouds at unusually close quarters. In the clefts of rocks I observed the small, delicate, bright coloured flowers and the many wonderful mosses, and on clear days I used to like to walk uphill for an hour until I could see the clearly outlined distant peaks of high mountains, their blue silhouettes, and white, sparkling snow fields across the other side of the hill.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

Beautiful,” she murmurs. “Very,” I say back. Except, I’m not looking at the sky anymore. I’m looking at her, visually tracing the elegant slope of her throat. Her deep eyes, her full lips, and glowing skin. She’s downright enchanting.

Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched. When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity.

assault and robbery in broad daylight in the centre of Paris. And yet the recipient of his blows was excusable in one respect, for the trend of the downward slope brings desire so rapidly to the point of enjoyment that beauty in itself appears to imply consent.

I don’t know who I am.” “You’re Skylar Stone. You’re charming, kind, clever, helpful, beautiful inside and out. You don’t give up. You bring people together, not because you want to use them but because you truly want to help people be better, to build good things. You help people find themselves. Sometimes you lose your way, but at the end of the day, you have a pure heart and the best of intentions. You’re curious, you have drive…” He ran fingers down the slope of Skylar’s neck. “You’re sexy. In ways I didn’t know sexy could be. You’re romantic. You’re attentive, caring, sweet—” Skylar stopped his words with a kiss. It was a simple press of lips. A soft, gentle pressure, the same as it had been the time he’d kissed Xander in the hall. But this time Skylar had so many emotions pent up behind the kiss

[What a great way to describe how a city takes its unique "shape"...beautiful turn-of-phrase by Kieran Shields(!)]: "It was a city of slopes, curves, and dips carved by glaciers and now criss-crossed by a network of angled streets and blocks, unfettered by any sense of regularity and uniformity. Portland's maze of cobbled roads was the result of two and a half centuries of fisherman and merchants driven by immediate necessity and that economy of steps that occurs naturally in a place where winters often lasted five months out of the year.

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone.

The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the scene.

Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom- apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the 'Mittel Land' ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillside like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadors would not repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point. Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colors of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water.

Outside, I shivered in a landscape of greys and silvers, the stone walls and cobbles looming pale in the wintry air. The only true color was an amber penumbra shimmering around the moon. Beyond the silvered slope of overgrown lawn, the mass of black trees moved to and fro in the breeze, with a strange undulation like waving sea fronds.

At Padovani Beach the dance hall is open every day. And in that huge rectangular box with its entire side open to the sea, the poor young people of the neighborhood dance until evening. Often I used to await there a a moment of exceptional beauty. During the day the hall is protected by sloping wooden awnings. When the sun goes down they are raised. Then the hall is filled with an odd green light born of the double shell of the sky and the sea. When one is seated far from the windows, one sees only the sky and, silhouetted against it, the faces of the dancers passing in succession. Sometimes a waltz is being played, and against the green background the black profiles whirl obstinately like those cut-out silhouettes that are attached to a phonograph's turntable. Night comes rapidly after this, and with it the lights. But I am unable to relate the thrill and secrecy that subtle instant holds for me. I recall at least a magnificent tall girl who had danced all afternoon. She was wearing a jasmine garland on her right blue dress, wet with perspiration from the small of her back to her legs. She was laughing as she danced and throwing back her head. As she passed the tables, she left behind her a mingled scent of flowers and flesh. When evening came, I could no longer see her body pressed tight to her partner, but against her body alternating spots of white jasmine and black hair, and when she would throw back her swelling breast I would hear her laugh and see her partner's profile suddenly plunge forward. I owe to such evenings the idea I have of innocence. In any case, I learn not to separate these creatures bursting with violent energy from the sky where their desires whirl.

Stone and the dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming ... it is coming... One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then ... then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.

The "Avenue," so called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the boughs the air was full of a purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle. Its beauty seemed to strike the child dumb. She leaned back in the buggy, her thin hands clasped before her, her face lifted rapturously to the white splendor above. Even when they had passed out and were driving down the long slope to Newbridge she never moved or spoke. Still with rapt face she gazed afar into the sunset west, with eyes that saw visions trooping splendidly across that glowing background. Through Newbridge, a bustling little village where dogs barked at them and small boys hooted and curious faces peered from the windows, they drove, still in silence. When three more miles had dropped away behind them the child had not spoken. She could keep silence, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk.

Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact—that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history—because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure—combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).

The hand of nature was stretching itself out towards him, for the tall grass on the slopes of the Bulashah Hills was in sight, and he had opened his heart to it, lifted by the cool breeze that wafted him away from the crowds, the ugliness and the noise of the outcastes' street. He looked across at the swaying loveliness before him and the little hillocks over which it spread under a sunny sky, so transcendingly blue and beautiful that he felt like standing dumb and motionless before it. He listened to the incoherent whistling of the shrubs. They were the voices he knew so well. He was glad that his friends were ahead of him and that the thrum was not broken, for the curve of his soul seemed to bend over the heights, straining to woo nature in solitude and silence. It seemed to him he would be unhappy if he heard even one human voice. His inside seemed to know that it wouldn't be soothed if there were the slightest obstruction between him and the outer world. It didn't even occur to him to ask why he had come here. He was just swamped by the merest fringe of the magnificent fields that spread before him. He had been startled into an awareness of the mystery of vegetable moods.

You’re not like any man I’ve ever known,” she said. “You’re not even someone I could have dreamed. You’re like someone from a fairy story written in a language I don’t even know.” “The prince, I hope.” “No, you’re the dragon, a beautiful wicked dragon.” Her voice turned wistful. “How could anyone have a normal everyday life with you?” Cam took her in a safe, firm grip and lowered her to the mattress. “Maybe you’ll be a civilizing influence on me.” He bent over the slope of her breast, kissing it through the muslin veil of her gown. “Or maybe you’ll get a taste for the dragon.” He found the bud of her nipple, wet the cotton with his mouth, until the tender flesh pricked up against his tongue. “I th-think I already have.” She sounded so perturbed that he laughed. “Then lie still,” he whispered, “while I breathe fire on you.

Most of this is my contribution to Havenhurst,” she told him proudly. The sight that Ian beheld when he looked up made his grin fade as tenderness and awe shook through him. Spread out before him in colorful splendor were the most magnificent flower gardens Ian had ever beheld. The other heirs of Havenhurst might have added stone and mortar to the house, but Elizabeth had given it breathtaking beauty. “When I was young,” she confided softly, looking out at the sloping gardens and the hills beyond, “I used to think this was the most beautiful place on earth.” Feeling a little foolish over her confidences, Elizabeth glanced up at him with an embarrassed smile. “What is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?” Dragging his gaze from the beauty of the gardens, Ian looked down at the beauty beside him. “Any place,” he said huskily, “where you are.

Two blind men waited at the end of an era, contemplating beauty. They sat atop the world’s highest cliff, overlooking the land and seeing nothing.’ ‘Huh?’ She looked to him. ‘“Can beauty be taken from a man?” the first asked the second. ‘“It was taken from me,” the second replied. “For I cannot remember it.” This man was blinded in a childhood accident. “I pray to the God Beyond each night to restore my sight, so that I may find beauty again.” ‘“Is beauty something one must see, then?” the first asked. ‘“Of course. That is its nature. How can you appreciate a work of art without seeing it?” ‘“I can hear a work of music,” the first said. ‘“Very well, you can hear some kinds of beauty – but you cannot know full beauty without sight. You can know only a small portion of beauty.” ‘“A sculpture,” the first said. “Can I not feel its curves and slopes, the touch of the chisel that transformed common rock into uncommon wonder?” ‘“I suppose,” said the second, “that you can know the beauty of a sculpture.” ‘“And what of the beauty of food? Is it not a work of art when a chef crafts a masterpiece to delight the tastes?” ‘“I suppose,” said the second, “that you can know the beauty of a chef’s art.” ‘“And what of the beauty of a woman,” the first said. “Can I not know her beauty in the softness of her caress, the kindness of her voice, the keenness of her mind as she reads philosophy to me? Can I not know this beauty? Can I not know most kinds of beauty, even without my eyes?” ‘“Very well,” said the second. “But what if your ears were removed, your hearing taken away? Your tongue taken out, your mouth forced shut, your sense of smell destroyed? What if your skin were burned so that you could no longer feel? What if all that remained to you was pain? You could not know beauty then. It can be taken from a man.

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword. She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light. Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her. A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair. Far out in the bay a cluster of almost motionless fishing boats hovered like a flock of white birds on the tranquil sea. How beautiful, how beautiful. Not to have died before this . . . to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this . 

Anne went to the little Avonlea graveyard the next evening to put fresh flowers on Matthew’s grave and water the Scotch rosebush. She lingered there until dusk, liking the peace and calm of the little place, with its poplars whose rustle was like low, friendly speech, and its whispering grasses growing at will among the graves. When she finally left it and walked down the long hill that sloped to the Lake of Shining Waters it was past sunset and all Avonlea lay before her in a dreamlike afterlight— ‘a haunt of ancient peace.’ There was a freshness in the air as of a wind that had blown over honey-sweet fields of clover. Home lights twinkled out here and there among the homestead trees. Beyond lay the sea, misty and purple, with its haunting, unceasing murmur. The west was a glory of soft mingled hues, and the pond reflected them all in still softer shadings. The beauty of it all thrilled Anne’s heart, and she gratefully opened the gates of her soul to it.

The lawn gently sloped to a winding stream, so clear as perfectly to reflect the beautiful scenery of heaven, now glowing with the gold and purple of the setting sun; from the opposite bank of the stream rose a stupendous mountain, diversified with little verdant hills and dales, and skirted with a wild shrubbery, the blossoms of which perfumed the air with the most balmy fragrance. Lord Mortimer prevailed upon Amanda to sit down upon a rustic bench, beneath the spreading branches of an oak, enwreathed with ivy; here they had not sat long ere the silence which reigned around was suddenly interrupted by strains, at once low, solemn and melodious, that seemed to creep along the water, till they had reached the place where they sat; and then, as if a Naiad of the stream had left her rushy couch to do them homage, they swelled by degrees into full melody, which the mountain echoes alternately revived and heightened. It appeared like enchantment to Amanda, and her eyes, turned to lord Mortimer, seemed to say it was to his magic it was owing.

Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me....It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high up in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in, and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart.

Slung on a stage over the gunwale of an old felucca, the Peri. A storm had just passed, rushing away toward the land in a great slope of clouds; already turning yellowish from the desert. The sea there is the color of Damascus plums; and how quiet. Sun was going down; not a beautiful sunset, more a gradual darkening of the air and that storm’s mountainside. The Peri had been damaged, we hove to alongside and hailed her master. No reply. Only the sailor—I never saw his face—one of your fellahin who abandon the land like a restless husband and then grumble for the rest of their term afloat. It’s the strongest marriage in the world. This one wore a kind of loincloth and a rag round his head for the sun which was almost gone. After we’d shouted in every dialect we had among us, he replied in Tuareg: ‘The master is gone, the crew is gone, I am here and I am painting the ship.’ It was true: he was painting the ship. She’d been damaged, not a load line in sight, and a bad list. ‘Come aboard,’ we told him, ‘night is nearly on us and you cannot swim to land.’ He never answered, merely continued dipping the brush in his earthen jar and slapping it smoothly on the Peri’s creaking sides. What color? It looked gray but the air was dark. This felucca would never again see the sun. Finally I told the helmsman to swing our ship round and continue on course. I watched the fellah until it was too dark: becoming smaller, inching closer to the sea with every swell but never slackening his pace. A peasant with all his uptorn roots showing, alone on the sea at nightfall, painting the side of a sinking ship.

Against a set of desolate scenery, amid spectral crags and livid mountains of ash, beneath the funereal daylight of slopes illuminated in blue, she personified the spirit of the witches' sabbat. Morbid and voluptuous, sometimes with extenuated grace and infinite lassitude, she seemed to carry the burden of a criminal beauty, a beauty charged with all the sins cf the multitude. She fell again and again upon her pliant legs, and as she outlined the symbolic gestures of her two beautiful dead arms she seemed to be towing them behind her. Then, the vertigo of the abyss took hold of her again, and like one possessed she stood on point, holding herself fully erect from top to toe, like a spike of flesh and shadows. Her arms, weighed down just a few moments earlier, became menacing, demoniac, and audacious. Twisting like a screw, she whirled around, like a winnowing-machine - no, like a great lily stirred by a storm-wind. Clownish and macabre, a nacreous gleam showed between her lips... oh, that cruel and sardonic smile, and the two deep pools of her terrible eyes! Ize Kranile!

At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. “Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.” She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.

How do you remain an individual when you are also part of so powerfully driven a pair?” “Irrational or justified, it is what it is.” Gideon was realizing the logic of that for himself even as he spoke the words. “Perhaps, in time, it will be less acute. I have no desire to rob you of your individuality, nor do I wish to lose my own. It is difficult for me as well . . . I have been so solitary throughout my lifetime, and now, to be suddenly given such riveting company . . . I fear I cannot do you the justice you deserve. And for you it will be worse; with the influx of power you are beginning to experience it will be taxing, to say the least.” “I know.” Legna reached up and splayed her palms over the dark silk covering his chest. “I suppose at some point, if I start to go crazy, you are going to have to knock me out or tie me up or something.” “Hmm. The latter has possibilities,” he mused with a growling smile that erased the tension in his face. Legna laughed, giving him a shove. “Gideon, you are nothing but an ancient pervert,” she teased him. “And this is an issue because . . . ?” “You are horrible!” She pushed away from him, gaining her feet. He reached to take her hand, pulling her closer once more and continuing to do so until she had nowhere else to go but his lap. She took the seat, her voluminous skirts spreading over them both. “I will forgive you, this time,” she conceded. “Thank you,” he said with honest graciousness. “Now, my beauty, tell me what you would like to do to get to know me better. I find myself looking forward to your discoveries.” “Well, I did not think of anything specific. I imagined time would fill itself.” “That is dangerously liberal, sweet. If you leave it up to the natural course of things, I can tell you exactly what we will end up doing.” Legna giggled, blushing because she realized he was right. Even just sitting in his lap and talking as she was, she could feel the mutual awareness that sparked between them, constantly simmering and waiting for just a little more heat to bring them up to the boiling point. “Very well, I am open to suggestions,” she invited. “Again, too liberal,” he teased, his eyes twinkling with mischievous starlight. “You are incorrigible. I never realized you were a sex fiend, Gideon.” “I am now,” he amended, drawing a finger down the slope of her nose.

O Lord, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all.… —Psalm 104:24 (NAS) In her intriguing book What’s Your God Language? Dr. Myra Perrine explains how, in our relationship with Jesus, we know Him through our various “spiritual temperaments,” such as intellectual, activist, caregiver, traditionalist, and contemplative. I am drawn to naturalist, described as “loving God through experiencing Him outdoors.” Yesterday, on my bicycle, I passed a tom turkey and his hen in a sprouting cornfield. Suddenly, he fanned his feathers in a beautiful courting display. I thought how Jesus had given me His own show of love in surprising me with that wondrous sight. I walked by this same field one wintry day before dawn and heard an unexpected huff. I had startled a deer. It was glorious to hear that small, secret sound, almost as if we held a shared pleasure in the untouched morning. Visiting my daughter once when she lived well north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, I can still see the dark silhouettes of the caribou and hear the midnight crunch of their hooves in the snow. I’d watched brilliant green northern lights flash across the sky and was reminded of the emerald rainbow around Christ’s heavenly throne (Revelation 4:3). On another Alaskan visit, a full moon setting appeared to slide into the volcanic slope of Mount Iliamna, crowning the snow-covered peak with a halo of pink in the emerging light. I erupted in praise to the triune God for the grandeur of creation. Traipsing down a dirt road in Minnesota, a bloom of tiny goldfinches lifted off yellow flowers growing there, looking like the petals had taken flight. I stopped, mesmerized, filled with the joy of Jesus. Jesus, today on Earth Day, I rejoice in the language of You. —Carol Knapp Digging Deeper: Pss 24:1, 145:5; Hb 2:14

Shocked, she uttered a hoarse protest and shifted beneath him, but he soothed her with his hands, stroking her legs and hips, resettling her on the mattress. "Lie still. You don't have to do anything, my love. Let me take care of you. Yes. You can touch me if you... mmm, yes..." He purred as he felt her trembling fingers touch his glistening hair, the back of his neck, the hard slope of his shoulders. He moved lower, his hair-roughened legs sliding along the insides of hers, and she realized that his face was just above the triangle of fiery red curls. Flooded with embarrassment, she automatically reached down to cover the private area with her hand. St. Vincent's erotic mouth lowered to her hip, and she felt him smile against her tender skin. "You shouldn't do that," he whispered. "When you hide something from me, I want it all the more. I'm afraid you're filling my head with the most lascivious ideas... you'd better take your hand away, sweet, or I might do something really depraved." As her shaking hand withdrew, he let one fingertip wander into the springy hair, delicately searching the cushiony softness. "That's right... obey your husband," he whispered wickedly, stroking farther, deeper, until he had separated the cluster of curls. "Especially in bed. How beautiful you are. Open your legs, my love. I'm going to touch inside you. No, don't be afraid. Will it help if I kiss you here? Be still for me..." Evie sobbed as his mouth searched through the triangle of brilliant red hair. His warm, ruthlessly patient tongue found the little peak half concealed beneath the vulnerable hood. His long, agile finger probed the entrance of her body, but he was momentarily dislodged as she jerked in surprise. Whispering reassurances against her swollen flesh, St. Vincent slid his finger inside her again, deeper this time. "Innocent darling," came his soft murmur, and his tongue tickled a place so excruciatingly sensitive that she quivered and moaned. At the same time, his finger stroked her inner softness with a languid rhythm.

And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.

When she...walked down the long hill that sloped to the Lake of Shining Waters it was past sunset and all Avonlea lay before her in a dreamlike afterlight- 'a haunt of ancient peace'. There was a freshness in the air as of a wind that had blown over honeysweet fields of clover. Home lights twinkled out here and there among the homestead trees. Beyond lay the sea, misty and purple, with its haunting, unceasing murmur. The west was a glory of soft mingled hues, and the pond reflected them all in still softer shadings. The beauty of it all thrilled Anne's heart, and she gratefully opened the gates of her soul to it. 'Dear old world,' she murmured, 'you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.

them flouncing into the pool, drinking, tossing up their heads, drinking again, the water dribbling from their lips in silver threads. There was another flounce, and they came out of the pond, and turned back again towards the farm. She looked further around. Day was just dawning, and beside its cool air and colours her heated actions and resolves of the night stood out in lurid contrast. She perceived that in her lap, and clinging to her hair, were red and yellow leaves which had come down from the tree and settled silently upon her during her partial sleep. Bathsheba shook her dress to get rid of them, when multitudes of the same family lying round about her rose and fluttered away in the breeze thus created, "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing." There was an opening towards the east, and the glow from the as yet unrisen sun attracted her eyes thither. From her feet, and between the beautiful yellowing ferns with their feathery arms, the ground sloped downwards to a hollow, in which was a species of swamp, dotted with fungi. A morning mist hung over it now—a fulsome yet magnificent silvery veil, full of light from the sun, yet semi-opaque—the hedge behind it being in some measure hidden by its hazy luminousness. Up the sides of this depression grew sheaves of the common rush, and here and there a peculiar species of flag, the blades of which glistened in the emerging sun, like scythes. But the general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth. The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree stumps, some exhibiting to her listless gaze their clammy tops, others their oozing gills. Some were marked with great splotches, red as arterial blood, others were saffron yellow, and others tall and attenuated, with stems like macaroni. Some were leathery and of richest browns. The hollow seemed a nursery of pestilences small and great, in the immediate neighbourhood of comfort and health, and Bathsheba arose with a tremor at the thought of having passed the night on the brink of so dismal a place.

THERE WAS A BOY" THERE was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander!--many a time, At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone, Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake; And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, 10 That they might answer him.--And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call,--with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause Of silence such as baffled his best skill: Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice 20 Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake. This boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs Upon a slope above the village-school; 30 And, through that church-yard when my way has led On summer-evenings, I believe, that there A long half-hour together I have stood Mute--looking at the grave in which he lies!

She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor. And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.

I was through arguing. My real concern was with Gavin. Lifting my eyes I considered his face—perfectly rounded cheeks, a confident chin, big brown eyes balanced evenly over a gently sloped nose, all framed by a mess of dark curls. My heart sank at his beauty. A boy like him would never really have anything to do with a girl like me. 'Why are you here?' I asked. I knew my tone sounded dismal. It was impossible to disguise how I felt. 'Because I want to be,' he answered. 'You want to be here? Really?' 'Well, yes,' he said. His face screwed up, confused. His next words came across as defensive. 'I’m the key keeper. I can go anywhere I wish to. You can’t stop me, Annabelle.' 'Stop you? I don’t want to stop you,' I said. 'I just thought that... I mean, I didn’t think that…' It was hard to voice my fear aloud.

It is a lovely strath. The flat river lands widen and narrow, the path goes by and through hazel woods where nuts ripen in harvest weather, discloses sudden meadows where rabbits look and vanish, swerves round and on, but ever holds by the river. The slopes that shut out the strath from the moors are steep and wooded to their summits. It is not a glen of the mountains, craggy, stupendous, physically impressive. There is nothing here to overwhelm the romantic mind. Its beauty is an inward grace in oneself akin to what is indefinable in the memory of a masterpiece. Beauty, intimate and secretive, has a lingering, lovely mirth; at the core of it, hope and fulfilment meet and tread a measure; while heads turn with glistening eyes to look for any or no excuse to laugh. In some such mood the Creator must have looked upon his handiwork and called it good.

The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thin sheets. Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren waste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind, the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty Stanton’s grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness grew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface of the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter of graves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of the vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit beside this woman’s last resting-place — a spirit like the night, sad, lonely, silent, mystical, immense. And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves. In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed and forgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by the divinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.

Dawn and a high film; the sun burned it; But noon had a thick sheet, and the clouds coming, The low rain-bringers, trooping in from the north, From the far cold fog-breeding seas, the womb of storms. Dusk brought a wind and the sky opened: All down the west the broken strips lay snared in the light, Bellied and humped and heaped on the hills. The set sun threw the blaze up; The sky lived redly, banner on banner of far-burning flame, From south to north the furnace door wide and the smoke rolling. We in the fields, the watchers from the burnt slope, Facing the west, facing the bright sky, hopelessly longing to know the red beauty-- But the unable eyes, the too-small intelligence, The insufficient organs of reception Not a thousandth part enough to take and retain. We stared, and no speaking. and felt the deep loneness of incomprehension. The flesh must turn cloud, the spirit, air, Transformation to sky and the burning, Absolute oneness with the west and the down sun. But we, being earth-stuck, watched from the fields, Till the rising rim shut out the light; Till the sky changed, the long wounds healed; Till the rain fell.

Let me return from history and draw my conclusion. What all this means to us at the present time is this: Our system has already passed its flowering. Some time ago it reached that summit of blessedness which the mysterious game of world history sometimes allows to things beautiful and desirable in themselves. We are on the downward slope. Our course may possible stretch out for a very long time, but in any case nothing finer, ore beautiful, and more desirable than what we have already had can henceforth be expected. The road leads downhill. Historically we are, I believe, ripe for dismantling. And there is no doubt that such will be our fate, not today or tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. I do not draw this conclusion from any excessively moralistic estimate of our accomplishments and our abilities: I draw it far more from the movements which I see already on the way in the outside world. Critical times are approaching; the omens can be sensed everywhere; the world is once again about to shift its center of gravity. Displacements of power are in the offing. They will not take place without war and violence. From the Far East comes a threat not only to peace, but to life and liberty. Even if our country remains politically neutral, even if our whole nation unanimously abides by tradition (which is not the case) and attempts to remain faithful to Castalian ideals, that will be in vain. Some of our representatives in Parliament are already saying that Castalia is a rather expensive luxury for our country. The country may very soon be forced into a serious rearmament - armaments for defensive purposes only, of course - and great economies will be necessary. In spite of the government's benevolent disposition towards us, much of the economizing will strike us directly. We are proud that our Order and the cultural continuity it provides have cost the country as little as they have. In comparison with other ages, especially the early period of the Feuilletonistic Age with its lavishly endowed universities, its innumerable consultants and opulent institutes, this toll is really not large. It is infinitesimal compared with the sums consumed for war and armaments during the Century of Wars. But before too long this kind of armament may once again be the supreme necessity; the generals will again dominate Parliament; and if the people are confronted with the choice of sacrificing Castalia or exposing themselves to the danger of war and destruction, we know how they will choose. Undoubtedly a bellicose ideology will burgeon. The rash of propaganda will affect youth in particular. Then scholars and scholarship, Latin and mathematics, education and culture, will be considered worth their salt only to the extent that they can serve the ends of war.

I turned the shower off and, instead of toweling and dressing before the steam on the door mirror cleared, like I normally would, I waited. It was an accident, my beauty revealed to me. I was daydreaming, thinking about the day before, of Trevor and me behind the Chevy, and had stood in the tub with the water off for too long. By the time I stepped out, the boy before the mirror stunned me. Who was he? I touched the face, its sallow cheeks. I felt my neck, the braid of muscles sloped to collarbones that jutted into stark ridges. The scraped-out ribs sunken as the skin tried to fill its irregular gaps, the sad little heart rippling underneath like a trapped fish. The eyes that wouldn’t match, one too open, the other dazed, slightly lidded, cautious of whatever light was given it. It was everything I hid from, everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow. And yet, I stayed. I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.

His home was a part of him, an externalized expression of his will, for upon his inherited Dutch Manor house he had superimposed the Gothic magnificence which he desired. He had been attracted by the formulations of Andrew Downing, the young landscape architect who lived on the river at Newburgh and whose directions for building "romantic and picturesque villas" were changing the countryside; but it was not in Nicholas to accept another's ideas, and when five years ago he had remodeled the old Van Ryn homestead, he had used Downing simply as a guide. To the original ten rooms he had added twenty more, the gables and turrets, and the one high tower. The result, though reminiscent of a German Schloss on the Rhine, crossed with Tudor English and interwoven with pure fantasy, was nevertheless Hudson River American and not unsuited to its setting. The Dragonwyck gardens were as much as an expression of Nicholas' personality as was the mansion, for here, he had subdued Nature to a stylized ornateness. Between the untouched grove of hemlocks to the south and the slope of a rocky hill half a mile to the north he had created along the river an artificial and exotic beauty. To Miranda it was overpowering, and she felt dazed as they mounted marble steps from the landing. She was but vaguely conscious of the rose gardens and their pervasive scent, of small Greek temples set beneath weeping willows, of rock pavilions, violet-bordered fountains, and waterfalls.

Little by little, his eyes warmed into that dusky shade of brown she'd come to miss. A shadow traced the outline of his body, from the curve in his neck to the powerful slope of his shoulders. As his glimmering blue aura faded, his hair blackened, and his skin, bronzed from years of training under the sun, glowed with life. She had no idea what came over her- impulse or instinct- but she reached for Shang's hand. He looked surprised, and for an instant she wondered whether it was because he could feel her touch, or because she had reached for him. Maybe both. Shang's stance loosened, and he drew her close, not letting go of her hand. "I told you once you were the craziest man I'd ever met. I guess I have to change that to the craziest woman." Mulan laughed. "You're delaying us from leaving Diyu to tell me that?" "And that Ping was right about his sister." Now Mulan lifted her chin, curious. "Why is that?" "She's strong and kind and beautiful and brave...." "And also speaks her mind," Mulan reminded him. "... Honest, in the way that counts most." "And she occasionally disobeys orders," Mulan warned him, "even from her commanding officer." "... She has discerning judgment." Mulan smiled. Tentatively, she reached for a wisp of hair that clung to Shang's temple. She brushed it aside gently, and Shang caught her hand in his and brought it to his chest. Mulan's skin tingled. "I'll never meet another girl like her," he said. "Now that the war is over, I'd be a fool to let her out of my sight.

Sheltered Garden" I have had enough. I gasp for breath. Every way ends, every road, every foot-path leads at last to the hill-crest-- then you retrace your steps, or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate. I have had enough-- border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. O for some sharp swish of a branch-- there is no scent of resin in this place, no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent-- only border on border of scented pinks. Have you seen fruit under cover that wanted light-- pears wadded in cloth, protected from the frost, melons, almost ripe, smothered in straw? Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit-- let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shrivelled by the frost, to fall at last but fair With a russet coat. Or the melon-- let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste-- it is better to taste of frost-- the exquisite frost-- than of wadding and of dead grass. For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves-- spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off, trail great pine branches, hurled from some far wood right across the melon-patch, break pear and quince-- leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant. O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.

I still cherish my childhood memories of the sun opening the dusky eyelids of the west and the misty mornings against the backdrop of of Kgalatlou Mountain. The green prime of summer, twingling leaves of acacia yrees of Manthakge Plains, pure clear sky, the smooth plough fields and lush green meadows. In winter, that green carpet will be replaced by drearily looking land like a dim picture of the drowned past, all signs of life and feeling gone out of it, with the plough fields scorched and naked, the streams of Manyane silent, and the grass of the meadows looking like burned powder.  I still remember and cherish the touch of autumn nights and the ruddy moon leaning over Madibong. When I think about this, a sorrowful silent tear always roll down my cheek, I become sad and gripped by grief because of what has now become of the land of my forefathers. I have known and cherished its distinguished  rocks, fauna, and flora since I could stand and walk. I know its mountain slopes, plains, its rocks, and bushes like the veins and knuckles at the back of my hand. The ever changing beauty of Leolo Mountains, from the aloes of Segodi Boulders to the lilies of Legaletlweng; the imposing Letheleding Boulders towering over Manyane Dale. The interesting contrast of granite ingenious sedimentary rocks of Leolo Mountains and the red sand rock of Seolwane Mountain, the red sandy soil of Leruleng, the dark clay soil of Marakane and the red fertile loom soil of Sehalbeng Plains. The Magnetite rocks Ga - Sethadi and the shale rocks of Malatjane.

THE DEMANDS MADE by a work of this nature upon the generosity of specialists are very numerous, and the Editor would be wanting in all title to the generous treatment he has received were he not willing to make the fullest possible acknowledgment of his indebtedness. His thanks are due in the first place to the scholarly and accomplished Bahadur Shah, baggage elephant 174 on the Indian Register, who, with his amiable sister Pudmini, most courteously supplied the history of ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ and much of the information contained in ‘Servants of the Queen’. The adventures of Mowgli were collected at various times and in various places from a multitude of informants, most of whom desire to preserve the strictest anonymity. Yet, at this distance, the Editor feels at liberty to thank a Hindu gentleman of the old rock, an esteemed resident of the upper slopes of Jakko, for his convincing if somewhat caustic estimate of the national characteristics of his caste–the Presbytes. Sahi, a savant of infinite research and industry, a member of the recently disbanded Seeonee Pack, and an artist well known at most of the local fairs of Southern India, where his muzzled dance with his master attracts the youth, beauty, and culture of many villages, have contributed most valuable data on people, manners, and customs. These have been freely drawn upon, in the stories of ‘Tiger-Tiger!’ ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, and ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’. For the outlines of ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ the Editor stands indebted to one of the leading herpetologists of Upper India, a fearless and independent investigator who, resolving ‘not to live but know’, lately sacrificed his life through over-application to the study of our Eastern Thanatophidia. A happy accident of travel enabled the Editor, when a passenger on the Empress of India, to be of some slight assistance to a fellow-voyager. How richly his poor services were repaid, readers of the ‘White Seal’ may judge for themselves.

But…but that’s tragic! To go through life without color? Unable to appreciate art, or beauty?” He laughed. “Now, sweet-hold your brush before you paint me a martyr’s halo. It’s not as though I’m blind. I have a great appreciation for art, as I believe we’ve discussed. And as for beauty…I don’t need to know whether your eyes are blue or green or lavender to know that they’re uncommonly lovely.” “No one has lavender eyes.” “Don’t they?” His gaze caught hers and refused to let go. Leaning forward, he continued, “Did that tutor of yours ever tell you this? That your eyes are ringed with a perfect circle a few shades darker than the rest of the…don’t they call it the iris?” Sophia nodded. “The iris.” He propped his elbow on the table and leaned forward, his gaze searching hers intently. “An apt term it is, too. There are these lighter rays that fan out from the center, like petals. And when your pupils widen-like that, right there-your eyes are like two flowers just coming into bloom. Fresh. Innocent.” She bowed her head, mixing a touch of lead white into the sea-green paint on her palette. He leaned closer still, his voice a hypnotic whisper. “But when you take delight in teasing me, looking up through those thick lashes, so saucy and self-satisfied…” She gave him a sharp look. He snapped his fingers. “There! Just like that. Oh, sweet-then those eyes are like two opera dancers smiling from behind big, feathered fans. Coy. Beckoning.” Sophia felt a hot blush spreading from her bosom to her throat. He smiled and reclined in his chair. “I don’t need to know the color of your hair to see that it’s smooth and shiny as silk. I don’t need to know whether it’s yellow or orange or red to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering how it would feel brushing against my bare skin.” Opening his book to the marked page, he continued, “And don’t get me started on your lips, sweet. If I endeavored to discover the precise shade of red or pink or violet they are, I might never muster the concentration for anything else.” He turned a leaf of his book, then fell silent. Sophia stared at her canvas. Her pulse pounded in her ears. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, channeling down between her shoulder blades, and a hot, itchy longing pooled at the cleft of her legs. Drat him. He’d known she was taunting him with her stories. And now he sat there in an attitude of near-boredom, making love to her with his teasing, colorless words in a blatant attempt to fluster her. It was as though they were playing a game of cards, and he’d just raised the stakes. Sophia smiled. She always won at cards. “Balderdash,” she said calmly. He looked up at her, eyebrow raised. “No one has violet lips.” “Don’t they?” She laid aside her palette and crossed her arms on the table. “The slope of your nose is quite distinctive.” His lips quirked in a lopsided grin. “Really.” “Yes.” She leaned forward, allowing her bosom to spill against her stacked arms. His gaze dipped, but quickly returned to hers. “The way you have that little bump at the ridge…It’s proving quite a challenge.” “Is that so?” He bent his head and studied his book. Sophie stared at him, waiting one…two…three beats before he raised his hand to rub the bridge of his nose. Quite satisfactory progress, that. Definite beginnings of fluster.

At the Fishhouses Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water's edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

It’s the most beautiful day I can imagine. The sky is perfectly blue, the winds that threatened the heli not visible to the naked eye. The mountains stretch endless around us. We’re more or less below the tree line, down by the drainage basin for one of the area’s sparkling-clear rivers. Snow-shrouded pines cluster in snowy bowls and are scattered sparser over the slopes. The powder is waist deep after the last few days’ snowfall, soft as down and white as confetti.

Hanne was going to sing in a church that evening, and she had asked whether I wanted to go and watch, of course I did. Her boyfriend would be there, so I didn't make my presence known, but when I saw her standing there, so beautiful and so pure, she was mine, no one else's feelings could hold a candle to those I cherished. Outside, the pavement was covered with grime, the remaining snow lay in dips and hollows and up shadowy slopes on both sides of the road. She sang, I was happy.

Ages of rain had run down the slope, circling, eddying in depressions, wearing deep round holes. There had been dry seasons, accumulations of dust, wind-blown seeds, and cedars rose wonderfully out of solid rock. But these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted, into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old. Theirs had been a bitter fight.

This was true mountain country, now, and true wilderness. Valley meadows, leafy trees halfway up the slopes, then evergreens gradually taking over at the higher altitudes... their road wound its way up and down through tree-tunnels that only intermittently allowed them to see the sky. It would have been a lovely journey under other circumstances. The weather remained fair, and remarkably pleasant, even if the night was going to be cold. She had only read about the wilderness, never experienced it for herself, and she found herself liking it a lot. Or- parts of it, anyway. The way it was never entirely silent, but simply 'quiet'- birdsong and insect noises, the rustle of leaves, the distant sound of water. She had never before realized how noisy people were. And the forest was so beautiful. She wasn't at all used to deep forest; it was like being inside a living cathedral, with beams of light penetrating the tree-canopy and illuminating unexpected treasures, a moss-covered rock, a small cluster of flowers, a spray of ferns. These woods were 'old', too, the trees had trunks so big it would take three people to put their arms around them, and there was a scent to the place that somehow conveyed that centuries of leaves had fallen here and become earth.

You’re not like any man I’ve ever known,” she said. “You’re not even someone I could have dreamed. You’re like someone from a fairy story written in a language I don’t even know.” “The prince, I hope.” “No, you’re the dragon, a beautiful wicked dragon.” Her voice turned wistful. “How could anyone have a normal everyday life with you?” Cam took her in a safe, firm grip and lowered her to the mattress. “Maybe you’ll be a civilizing influence on me.” He bent over the slope of her breast, kissing it through the muslin veil of her gown. “Or maybe you’ll get a taste for the dragon.” He found the bud of her nipple, wet the cotton with his mouth, until the tender flesh pricked up against his tongue. “I th-think I already have.” She sounded so perturbed that he laughed. “Then lie still,” he whispered, “while I breathe fire on you.

For a few moments he indulged his old joy in range and mountain, stretching, rising on his right, away into the purple distance. Something had heightened its beauty. How softly gray the rolling range land—how black the timbered slopes! The town before him sat like a hideous blotch on a fair landscape. It forced his gaze over and beyond toward the west, where the late afternoon sun had begun to mellow and redden, edging the clouds with exquisite light. To the southward lay Arizona, land of painted mesas and storied canyon walls, of thundering streams and wild pine forests, of purple-saged valleys and grassy parks, set like mosaics between the stark desert mountains.

From the earliest of times, the eye has had a privileged place in the conventions of Arabic poetry.22 As Richard Ettinghausen put it, In [Arabic courtly poetry] one reads that the ideal Arab woman must be so stout that she nearly falls asleep… . Her breasts should be full and rounded, her waist slender and graceful, her belly lean, her hips sloping, and her buttocks so fleshy as to impede her passage through a door. [Her neck is said to be] like that of a gazelle, while her arms are described as well rounded, with soft delicate elbows, full wrists, and long fingers. Her face [has] white cheeks, … and her eyes are those of a gazelle with the white of the eye clearly marked.23 Far from expanding creatively on this set of classical formulas, the figures of feminine beauty in the Nights often repeat them mechanically. This story cycle is filled with over a dozen derivative poems that repeat, in cliché terms, this same image of the beloved’s eye.

When she closed her eyes, he let his gaze travel over her. She lay on her side and he marveled at the perfect slopes of her shoulders, her waist, her hips. This woman was not only caring, courageous, and selfless, she was bewitchingly beautiful. He never knew such a person existed. If he were ever to marry, she would be . . . He shook his head and exhaled. She had a life in Boston to return to, and his home would be in Sandwich. This episode would be but a small chapter in the book of her life. Thomas

I jogged along the deck to the stern, tracking the shipwreck as it disappeared beneath our wake. Then, just as I was starting to wonder if we’d need climbing gear to get onto the island, its steep cliffs sloped down to meet us. We rounded a headland to enter a rocky half-moon bay. In the distance I saw a little harbor bobbing with colorful fishing boats, and beyond it a town set into a green bowl of land. A patchwork of sheep-speckled fields spread across hills that rose away to meet a high ridge, where a wall of clouds stood like a cotton parapet. It was dramatic and beautiful, unlike any place I’d seen. I felt a little thrill of adventure as we chugged into the bay, as if I were sighting land where maps had noted only a sweep of undistinguished blue.

You’ve saved your money and bought a ticket to Fashion Week in Milan. All the world’s great clothing designers will be showing their startling and beautiful designs. You’ll be one of the first to see them! Or picture yourself in Rome. You’re at a performance of the opera Aïda, written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. You’re seated amid eighteen-hundred-year-old ruins under a starry sky, listening to magnificent music. You’ve got your snowboard and warm clothing so you can glide down the slopes the world’s greatest skiers took during the 2006 Winter Olympics near Turin. Or perhaps it’s summer, and you’re going to explore the sea caves of Capri, off the coast of Naples. Later, you can take a look at the towering columns at Agrigento, among the temples the ancient Greeks built on the island of Sicily long before Italy existed. In any one of these places, you might be one of the millions of tourists who visit Italy every year. But alongside the tourists are Italians, also appreciative of the wonders of their own country.

Thank you for bringing me home. My heart will sing a song of friendship when I think of you, Hunter--for always into the horizon.” He gestured toward the stallion. “You will take him. He is strong and swift. He will carry you back to Comanche land, eh?” “Oh, no! I couldn’t. He’s yours!” “He walks a new way now. You are his good friend.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “I will never return to Comancheria, Hunter. Please, keep your horse.” “You keep. He is my gift to you, Blue Eyes.” Words eluded Loretta. Before she thought it through, she rose on her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his in what she intended to be a quick kiss of farewell. Hunter had heard of this strange tosi tivo custom called kissing. The thought of two people pressing their open mouths together had always disgusted him. Loretta was a different matter, however. Before she could pull away, he captured her face between his hands and tipped her head back to nibble lightly at her mouth. To learn the taste of her. And to remember. As inexpert as he was, when his mouth touched hers, a wave of heat zigzagged through him, pooling like fire low in his belly. Her lips were soft and full, as sweet as warm penende, honey. She gasped, and when she did, he dipped his tongue past her teeth to taste her moistness, which was even sweeter and made him think of other sweet places he would like to taste. Hunter at last understood why the tosi tivo liked kissing. She clutched his wrists and leaned away from him. He drew back and smiled, his palms still framing her face. Her large eyes shone as blue as the sky above them, startled and wary, just as they had so many times those first few days. She was like his mother’s beadwork, beautiful on the outside, a confusing tangle on the inside. Would he never understand her? “Good-bye, Hunter.” Reluctantly he released her and watched her lead the horse down the hill. At the base of the slope she turned and looked back. Their gazes met and held. Then she turned toward home and broke into a trot, the horse trailing behind her. Hunter shook his head. Only a White Eyes would walk when she had a perfectly good horse to ride.

Laura's mind was already racing with the creative possibilities presented to her. She whipped out her sketchbook and started to work away with a stump of charcoal, trying to capture the sweep of the hills and the patterns made by the blocks of light and dark. She half closed her eyes, the better to appreciate the variations in tone and depth. She was astonished to find just how brash and vivid and wonderfully discordant colors in nature could be. At this time of year there was no sense that things were attempting to blend or mingle or go unseen. Every tree, bush, and flower seemed to be shouting out its presence, each one louder than the next. On the lower slopes the leaves of the aged oak trees sang out, gleaming in the heat. On every hill bracken screamed in solid swathes of viridian. At Laura's feet the plum purple and dark green leaves of the whinberry bushes competed for attention with their own indigo berries. The kitsch mauve of the heather laughed at all notions of subtlety. She turned to a fresh page and began to make quick notes, ideas for a future palette and thoughts about compositions. She jotted down plans for color mixes and drew the voluptuous curve of the hills and the soft shape of the whinberry leaves.

You have chosen to give yourself to me, Miss Chadwick." The words were low and clear. "I do not take it lightly, this gift you've bestowed. But as I said, it will take far more than one night to make you mine." Lily released her breath on a soft sigh. Something flickered in his impenetrable stare, and he added in a murmur, "There will be no going back." The sentiment echoed her own from earlier, and Lily experienced a sense of rightness in that moment that overcame any lingering question or concern. They would be lovers. As they stood facing each other in silence, barely an inch separating them yet not touching at all, she wanted so badly to lift her hand and press it to the side of his face. She wanted to feel the hard angle of his jaw against her palm and the roughness of his skin where the shadowed start of a beard darkened his cheeks. Something held her back. She touched him with her studied gaze instead, observing the harsh lines of his face as a frown hardened his visage. She slid her attention briefly to the pulse beating at his temple, then across his oppressive eyebrows, down the slope of his strong nose. His mouth was pressed into a stern, unforgiving line, but it could not disguise the elegant upper arches or the generous lower curve of his bottom lip. His mouth was beautiful, she thought. Lifting her gaze again to meet his eyes, she was struck by the raw need she saw there.

What a startling sight... a healthy, virile male in his prime. Strong and completely muscled, barbaric and yet beautiful. Fortunately he was facing partially away from her, so that her surveillance went unnoticed. He toweled his hair until the thick locks stood on end and worked down to his arms and chest, scrubbing vigorously. His back was powerful, the line of his spine a pronounced groove. The broad slopes of his shoulders flexed as he draped the towel across and began to dry himself with a sawing motion. A plentitude of hair covered his limbs and the upper portion of his chest, and there was far more at his groin than the decorative tuft she had expected.

One beautiful winter morning when Utah’s deep powder snow was perfect for experienced skiers, he and Elder W. Craig Zwick headed to a nearby resort for a day on the slopes. As they hopped on the four-person chairlift for their umpteenth ride up the mountain, a young man skied up and got on with them. They remarked how wonderful it was that Monday morning to be out in the fresh Utah snow, and the young man responded, “Yes, but my life is in a shambles.” Elder Zwick remembered, “I felt like saying, ‘This is your lucky day,’ and about then the man realized he was on the chairlift with President Nelson and gasped. “In about four minutes,” Elder Zwick related, “President Nelson taught that young man the importance of the Book of Mormon and promised that if he would read it every day, his problems wouldn’t go away but they would be alleviated. That is how clearly he taught” (Church News/KSL Interview, January 5, 2018).

While she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of canyons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.

the data was plotted on mathematical diagrams that I invented. These revealed favorable situations and let me quickly specify the appropriate trades. Each day’s closing prices for a convertible and its stock were plotted as a color-coded dot on that particular convertible’s diagram. The diagrams were prepared with curves that were drawn by a computer from my formula and showed the “fair price” of the convertible. The beauty of this was that I could immediately see from the picture whether we had a profitable trading opportunity. If the dot representing the data was above the curve it meant the convertible was overpriced, leading to a possible hedge: Short the convertible, buy the stock. A data point close to or on the curve indicated the price was fair, which meant liquidate an existing position, do not enter a new one. Below the curve meant buy the convertible, short the stock. The distance of the dot from the curve showed me how much profit was available. If we thought it met our target, we tried to put on the trade the next day. The slope of the curve near the data point on my diagram gave me the hedge ratio, which is the number of shares of common stock to use versus each convertible bond, share of preferred, warrant, or option.

The nape of this man’s neck, bathed in the dim light of the nearby lamp, rose from beneath his collar like creamy white jade. It seemed defenseless, just waiting for the touch of another’s hand—as if by caressing it, one could reach ecstasy. The contours of his profile were smooth and beautiful, and the bridge of his nose sloped charmingly. But the corners of his eyes were most devastating: all that could make one’s heart itch lay within them, and the shadow of a smile seemed to rest at the tails of those upward crescents.

THOMAS Guilty Of mankind. I have perpetrated human nature. My father and mother were accessories before the fact, But there’ll be no accessories after the fact, By my virility there won’t! Just see me As I am, like a perambulating Vegetable, patched with inconsequential Hair, looking out of two small jellies for the means Of life, balanced on folding bones, my sex No Beauty but a blemish to be hidden Behind judicious rags, driven and scorched By boomerang rages and lunacies which never Touch the accommodating artichoke Or the seraphic strawberry beaming in its bed: I defend myself against pain and death by pain And death, and make the world go round, they tell me By one of my less lethal appetites: Half this grotesque life I spend in a state Of slow decomposition, using The name of unconsidered God as a pedestal On which I stand and bray that I’m best Of beasts, until under some patient Moon or other I fall to pieces, Like a cake of dung. Is there a slut would Hold this in her arms and put her lips against it? JENNET Sluts are only human. By a quirk Of unastonished nature, your obscene Decaying figure of vegetable fun Can drag upon a woman’s heart, as though Heaven were dragging up the roots of hell. What is to be done? Something compels us into The terrible fallacy that man is desirable and there’s no escaping into truth. The crimes And cruelties leave us longing, and campaigning Love still pitches his tent of light among The suns and moons. You may be decay and a platitude Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life. You may be corrupt as ancient applies, well then Corruption is what I most willingly harvest. You are Evil, Hell, the Father of Lies; if so Hell is my home and my days of good were a holiday: Hell is my hill and the world slopes away from it Into insignificance. I have come suddenly Upon my heart and where it is I see no help for.

This was trail magic. Sea Breeze’s fire, his light, his heat, his life, remained, their salvation. It is a fact that all drainages, if followed downhill, lead to the same lowland water body. Lost and fallen hikers follow drainages down because walking ridges is harder. And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way. It isn’t a coincidence that Sea Breeze, Brandon Day and Gina Allen, and countless other hikers all wandered, lost, down the same steep slope to nowhere.

The Ozarks are mountains in the Deep South sense of the word, not pyramidal peaks or potential ski slopes or alpine crags, but irregular elevations, a succession of low, deep green ridges, a sea of long, lumpy hills to the horizon in a dramatic panorama. That there is an identifiable and sundown-framed horizon in their midst gives the Ozarks their uniqueness: mountains that allow a great, gaudy, and effulgent sunset. No single Ozarkian topographical feature is apparent, but the whole of it – the broad shifting vista of elongated hills – appears like flattened and thickly forested mesas. And the view is especially moving because it seems unpeopled, the isolated communities hidden in hollows and behind the slopes, some of which are bunchy with old-growth trees, still remote and beautiful.