s crimsoned all things with their roses. Apollo sang to the
lyre, while a little Pan prattled on his reeds, and Venus danced very
sweetly to the soft music. Thus, with due rites, did Psyche pass into
the power of Cupid; and from them was born the daughter whom men call
Voluptas.

CHAPTER VI: EUPHUISM

[92] So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius, with
an expression changed in some ways from the original and on the whole
graver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more like
that "Lord, of terrible aspect," who stood at Dante's bedside and wept,
or had at least grown to the manly earnestness of the Eros of
Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, this
episode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation,
already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative
love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean--an
ideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued it
at various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty,
as the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed to
him just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken celestial fire,
to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, [93] soul or
spirit in things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the pure
brilliancy, and as it were in the happy light, of youth and morning and
the springtide, men's actual loves, with which at many points the book
brings one into close contact, might appear to him, like the general
tenor of their lives, to be somewhat mean and sordid. The hiddenness
of perfect things: a shrinking mysticism, a sentiment of diffidence
like that expressed in Psyche's so tremulous hope concerning the child
to be born of the husband she had never yet seen--"in the face of this
little child, at the least, shall I apprehend thine"--in hoc saltem
parvulo cognoscam faciem tuam: the fatality which seems to haunt any
signal+ beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself
something illicit and isolating: the suspicion and hatred it so often
excites in the vulgar:--these were some of the impressions, forming, as
they do, a constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience,
from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old story enforced on him. A
book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in
the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happ