Beauty, a thing of nought, the sages say,
But relative to sense, blood, pulse, ear, eye;
The mockery of life, fool nature’s play,
Who trifles kingdoms on a wanton’s sigh;
It lives not in the object it endues,
It takes its colour from the lover’s breast;
Yet ’tis not there, it flits between, and wooes
Existence unexplained, and ne’er exprest:
Steal from it colour, smoothness, odour, shape,
The empty phantom who would care to clasp?
It plays its gambols, a fantastic ape,
Deriding those, who for its presence gasp;
Even the form exists not, all things lie
’Twixt outward nothing, inward mystery.