Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/106

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Ideas of Good and Evil.

while the power, which in Laon and Cythna, awakens the mind of the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the tyrannies of the world, is first seen, as the star of love or beauty. And at the end of The Ode to Naples, he cries out to 'the spirit of beauty' to overturn the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with its 'harmonizing ardours.' He calls the spirit of beauty liberty, because despotism, and perhaps, as 'the man of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys,' all authority, pluck virtue from her path towards beauty, and because it leads us by that love whose service is perfect freedom. It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again that love is the perception of beauty in thought and things, and it orders all things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its expressions in thought and in action, by making us 'seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.' 'We are born into the world, and there is something

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