After all, though beauty be deceitful, and favour be vain, yet beauty is the most exquisite gift ever lavished by fairies around an infant cradle. It… - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

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After all, though beauty be deceitful, and favour be vain, yet beauty is the most exquisite gift ever lavished by fairies around an infant cradle. Its charm is nameless ; it wins us, we know not why — and lingers on our memory, we know not wherefore. Whether in the animate or the inanimate world, it is the cause of our most delicious sensations ; it belongs to the imagination, for it calls up within us whatever of poetry may be lurking in the "hidden mines of thought." It is the attribute of all that is most glorious in existence — it is on the azure sky — it clothes the earth as with a garment — it rides triumphant over the purple bosom of the sea. Look within our hearts, it has originated all that is ideal in our nature. Beauty is the shadow flung from heaven on earth — it is the type of a lovelier and more spiritual existence, and the broken and transitory lights that it flings on this our sad and heavy pilgrimage, do but indicate another and a better sphere, where the beautiful will also be the everlasting. The homage involuntarily paid to its mysterious influence is but an unconscious acknowledgment of its divine origin, and its eternal future.