Confuses all, and cannot much retain.

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XXIX.

Beauty, a thing of nought, the sages say,

But relative to sense, blood, pulse, ear, eye;

The mockery of life, fool nature’s play,

Who trifles kingdoms on a wanton’s sigh;

It lives not in the object it endues,

It takes its colour from the lover’s breast;

Yet ’tis not there, it flits between, and wooes

Existence unexplained, and ne’er exprest:

Steal from it colour, smoothness, odour, shape,

The empty phantom who would care to clasp?

It plays its gambols, a fantastic ape,

Deriding those, who for its presence gasp;

Even the form exists not, all things lie

’Twixt outward nothing, inward mystery.

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