The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
A beautiful woman! Not the beauty of Greece, on which we
gaze as upon some wondrous flower wafted from Elysian
Fields, and too ethereal for this gross world; nor that of
Rome, with Pallas' snow-clad bosom and retrospective eye;
but the sensuous beauty of the far south, that casts a
Circean spell upon the souls of men. Her eyes are not
dove's eyes that softly shine along the path to Heaven, but
wandering fires that light the way to Hell. Her lips are not a
thread of scarlet, chaste as childhood and dewy as the
dawn, but the deep sullen red of a city swept with flames.
Her breasts are not like young roes that feed among the
lilies, but ivory hemispheres threaded with purple fire and
tinged with sunset's tawny gold. Reverently as though
touching divinity's robe, Joseph caresses the wanton curls
that stream like an inky storm-cloud over the shapely
shoulders--he puts the little hands, heavy with costly gems,
back from the tearful face and holds them with a grasp so
fierce that the massy rings of beaten gold bruise the tender
flesh. Mrs. Potiphar starts up, alarmed by his unwonted
boldness--she reads his face with a swift glance that tells
her he is no longer a lad, a pretty boy to be trifled with for
the amusement of an idle hour. The Cupid's bow had
faded forever from his lip and childhood's innocence from
his eye; he has crossed life's Rubicon, has passed at one
stride from the Vale of Youth with its trifles and its idle
tears, its ignorance of sex and stainless love, to Manhood's
rugged mountains, where blazes Ambition's baleful star and
the fires of passion ever beat, fiercer than those that sweep
Gehenna's sulphurous hills.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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