The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things.

The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees.

Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice.

Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing.

Men might go through fire to find a cowslip.