'Tis noon - a calm, unbroken sleep
Is on the blue waves of the deep;
A soft haze, like a fairy dream,
Is floating over wood and stream;
And many a broad magnolia flower,
Within its shadowy woodland bower,
Is gleaming like a lovely star. [ George D. Prentice ]

I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty -
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? [ Ellen Sturgis Hooper ]

Thou hastenest down between the hills to meet me at the road.
The secret scarcely lisping of thy beautiful abode
Among the pines and mosses of yonder shadowy height.
Where thou dost sparkle into song, and fill the woods with light. [ Lucy Larcom ]

Beauty is a hovering, shining, shadowy form, the outline of which no definition holds. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Now had night measured, with her shadowy cone, half-way up hill this vast sublunar vault. [ Milton ]

Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again; wisely improve the present, it is thine; go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

You will get more profit from trying to find where beauty is, than in anxiously inquiring what it is. Once for all, it remains undemonstrable; it appears to us, as in a dream, when we behold the works of the great poets and painters; and in short, of all feeling artists; it is a hovering, shining, shadowy form, the outline of which no definition holds. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]