Loveliness

The tiny birthmark took nothing from her loveliness.

Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.

When the funeral was over Chloe led Daphnis to the grotto of the Nymphs where she assisted him in his ablutions, and then for the first time in his presence she washed her own white polished form which needed no bath, however, to enhance its loveliness.

Sometimes we inclined to conceive it as sheer Power, and symbolized it to ourselves by means of all the myriad power-deities of our many worlds. Sometimes we felt assured that it was pure Reason, and that the cosmos was but an exercise of the divine mathematician. Sometimes Love seemed to us its essential character, and we imagined it with the forms of all the Christs of all the worlds, the human Christs, the Echino-derm and Nautiloid Christs, the dual Christ of the Sym-biotics, the swarming Christ of the Insectoids. But equally it appeared to us as unreasoning Creativity, at once blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to spawn and spawn the infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and there among a thousand inanities a fragile loveliness. This it might for a while foster with maternal solicitude, till in a sudden jealousy of the excellence of its own creature, it would destroy what it had made.

Virtue is such a thing that even if men were ignorant of it, it would still be worthy of praise for its loveliness.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness; but still will keep / A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Then, seated in her barbaric chair above them all, with myself at her feet, was the veiled white woman, whose loveliness and awesome power seemed to visibly shine about her like a halo, or rather like the glow from some unseen light.

'A loveliness of ladybirds,' whispers Roisin to her sleeping child, and looks at her husband proudly. He grins back. 'Aye, the plague of last summer. Couldn't pick up a glass of lemonade without finding a hundred ladybirds using it as a bubble-bath.'

A loveliness of ladybugs is enjoying lunch - little aphids that pepper a crop of soybeans.

Sparks of sunlight caught on a loveliness of ladybirds that had floated into the waiting room through an open door.