As he contemplated the loveliness of her figure, it struck him as infinitely pathetic that even beauty such as hers should be so dependent on the sex… - John Cowper Powys

The day was warm; but the fact that the sky was covered with a filmy veil of grey clouds gave to the vast plain before him the appearance of a landscape whose dominant characteristic consisted in a patient effacement of all emphatic or outstanding qualities. The green of the meadows was a shy, watery green. The verdure of the elm trees was a sombre, blackish monotony. The yellow of the stubble land was a whitish-yellow, pallid and lustreless.

Sexual gratitude is an emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediæval times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree.

"What is wrong with so many clever people to-day is the fatal distrust lodged in their minds — and lodged there by a superstitious awe in the presence of transitory scientific theories — of the power in their own souls. What we need — and the key to it lies in ourselves — is a bold return to the magical view of life. I don't mean to the magic of Madame Blavatsky, but to that kind of faith in the potentialities of the ego, with which all great poetry and all great philosophy has been concerned. That feeling of exultant liberation from the immediate pressure of practical life, which any "logos" from the arena of Goethe, of Spinoza, or Leonardo, or Plato, or Heraclitus, or Epictetus, or the old Chinese Taoists conveys, is what we need."