'_This_,'[15] says one of the best known of our living poets, of the work that I select to quote from-- _This is the golden book of spirit and sense, The holy writ of beauty._ Of this '_holy writ_' the chief theme is love.

Let us go on to see how love is there presented to us.
'_You know_,' says Theophile Gautier's best-known hero, in a letter to a friend, '_you know the eagerness with which I have sought for physical beauty, the importance I attach to outward form, and how the world I am in love with is the world that the eyes can see: or to put the matter in more conventional language, I am so corrupt and blase that my faith in moral beauty is gone, and my power of striving after it also.

I have lost the faculty to discern between good and evil, and this loss has well nigh brought me back to the ignorance of the child or savage.

To tell the plain truth, nothing seems to me to be worthy either of praise or blame, and I am but little perturbed by even the most abnormal actions.

My conscience is deaf and dumb.