The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book. - Stéphane Mallarmé

A kiss would kill me, woman, If beauty were not death... By what attraction Am I drawn, what morn forgotten by the prophets That pours on the dying distance its sad rites?

When the sad sun sinks, It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks! No sunset, but the red awakening Of the last day concluding everything Struggles so sadly that time disappears, The redness of apocalypse, whose tears Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!

Etna! 'tis amid you, visited by Venus On your lava fields placing her candid feet, When a sad stillness thunders wherein the flame dies. I hold the queen!