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  ...secret more tenaciously.
Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty and elevates happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and that melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leaf brings out the wan loveliness of the primrose. The spectator enjoys the beauty, but his knowledge that _it_ is fleeting, and that _he_ fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something the beautiful object and the gazer are alike raised.
Everything is sweetened by risk.   The pleasant emotion is mixed and deepened by a sense of mortality. Those lovers who have never encountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novices in the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply because it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. A mother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping child, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for it more fervently; and yet there is more in her...   Smith, Alexander

Excerpt from Dreamthorp A Book of Essays Written in the Country · This quote is tagged Risk · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.

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