"Beauty and the Beast"

A feast of colour gay and bright,A scene of unalloyed delight,A glad escape from drabs and greys,From racking thought and toilsome days;A vision of a fairy landWhere youth and beauty hand in handDance through radiant summer hoursO'er verdant lawns bestrewn with flowers:Earth made a Paradise anew,The Golden Age again in view;All thought of life's sad discords drownedIn wave on wave of pulsing sound;Beauty, enchantment, poetry,Motion harmonious, rhythmic, free;Forms graceful, sinuous, and lithe,With gladsome animation blithe;Houris for whose bewitching eyesAngels would forfeit Paradise;All that the senses can delight,All that can wing time's heavy flight;A show of loveliness supreme,A realised poetic dream;All here exhilarates and gladdens,And not a thought intrudes that saddens;A wild delirium of joyWithout control, without alloy,Intoxicating and entrancingTill heart and brain and nerves are dancing!*****Ah! with a sudden shock of pain,I'm thrown back on myself again—Descending on the final rally,The curtain falls upon—the Ballet!And leaves me once again to feelThe disillusion of the real;To pass into the gloomy nightWith no deceptive splendours bright;To meditate how transitoryAre all man's pleasures, all his glory;How fast his happy moments fleet,While misery moves with leaden feet.*****What I moralise in style so triteThat Mawworms might your verses cite!Away with thoughts which, false or true,Are profitless and far from new;'Tis much to gain an hour's delight,And wing with joy time's weary flight:To analyse our joys awayIs but mere folly to display;If all our joys are but illusionsOur sorrows also are delusions:If nature cheats us into griefShould we not thank her for relief?If life is a dissolving viewThen death no more than life is true:Real are our visions while they last,Unreal as they seem when past:With every pleasant hour that's spentWe cheat the fates malevolent,Who may indeed with martyrdomAfflict us in the time to come,But cannot those blest hours recall,When pleasure did our souls enthral.