anges and winds into itself
belongs to us. She covers her eyes away from us, but she lets us play
with the tresses of her hair.

A TOWER ON THE APENNINE

The other day I was walking towards Urbino where I was to spend the
night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a
level place on the mountain top near the journey's end. My friends were
in a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still ascending in
great loops, and I was alone amid a visionary fantastic impossible
scenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon mountain after
mountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud darker than the rest
glimmered with lightning. Away to the south a mediaeval tower, with no
building near nor any sign of life, rose upon its solitary summit into
the clouds. I saw suddenly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a
little gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while about him broke a
windy light. He was the poet who had at last, because he had done so
much for the word's sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He
had hidden nothing of himself but he had taken care of 'that dignity ...
the perfection of form ... this lofty and severe quality ... this
virtue.' And though he had but sought it for the word's sake, or for a
woman's praise, it had come at last into his body and his mind.
Certainly as he stood there he knew how from behind that laborious mood,
that pose, that genius, no flower of himself but all himself, looked out
as from behind a mask that other Who alone of all men, the country
people say, is not a hair's breadth more nor less than six feet high. He
has in his ears well instructed voices and seeming solid sights are
before his eyes, and not as we say of many a one, speaking in metaphor,
but as this were Delphi or Eleusis, and the substance and the voice come
to him among his memories which are of women's faces; for was it
Columbanus or another that wrote 'There is one among the birds that is
perfect, and one perfect among the fish.'

THE THINKING OF THE BODY

Those learned men who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight
in lovers' eyes, all those butts of a traditional humour where there is
something of the wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians, theologians,
lawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have followed some
abstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs that only, and
have therefore stood before the looking-glas