prose 8
Eyes / beauty
Eyes are the harbingers of love; they as sluices let in the influences of that divine, powerful, soul-ravishing and captivating beauty, which is sharper than any dart or needle, wounds deeper into the heart; and opens a gap between the eyes.
No, she is so fair that if you do but see her, she will stupefy you, kill you straight and Medusa-like, turn you to stone; you cannot pull your eyes from her; but as a magnet does iron, she will carry you bound headlong wherever she goes...
Beauty; a still rhetoric that persuades without a speech, a kingdom without a guard, because beautiful persons command as so many captains.
I could tell you another story of a spindle that was fired by a fair lady's looks, or fingers, some say I know not well whether, but fired it was by report; and of a cold bath that suddenly smoked and was very hot when naked Celia came into it.
( A few excerpts from The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1628, by Robert Burton, 1576 - 1640. In wartime UK, paper was rationed and books hard to come by, so storerooms were scoured. In this way I imagine copies of the 1928 reprint of this extraordinary book came to light and were sold for a few shillings to book-hungry Londoners, myself among them. It deals with three melancholies or sicknesses; physical, that caused by love and that caused by religion. Each is elaborately organised into Partitions, Members, Sections and Sub-sections like a scientific treatise. But its 750 pages are made almost unreadable by the "too great accumulation of authorities", as the editor says, the result of Burton's prodigious learning. So a sentence hardly passes without quotations from two or three Latin authors, luckily translated in minutely printed footnotes. This dense packing in of classical references made the book "the delight of the learned, the solace of the indolent and the refuge of the uninformed". In whichever of these categories you like to place yourself you can with persistence discover unencumbered gems like the above, from the love melancholy section .... de-thou-ed for modern reading!)