His muscular thighs were set
above slender knees and fine legs ending in arched feet, with short
heels and spread toes. He walked slowly over the beach.
How beautiful is the human form when it appears in its original freedom,
as it was created in the first day of the world! But where are we to
find it, masked as it is and condemned never to reappear. That great
word, Nature, which humanity has repeated sometimes with idolatry and
sometimes with fear, which philosophers have sounded and poets have
sung, how it is being lost and forgotten! If there are still here and
there in the world, far from the pushing crowd, some hearts which are
tormented by the constant search of beauty, and forever feeling the
hopeless need of expressing what cannot be expressed and doing what can
only be dreamed, it is to Nature, as to the home of the ideal, that they
must turn. But how can they? By what magic will they be able to do so?
Man has cut down the forests, has conquered the seas, and the clouds
that hover over the cities are produced by the smoke that rises from the
chimneys. But, say others, do not his mission and his glory consist in
going forward and attacking the work of God, and encroaching upon it?
Man denies His work, he ruins it, crushes it, even in his own body, of
which he is ashamed and which he conceals like a crime.
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