And that reminds me: This,
after all, is a foreword to Green Mansions--the romance of the
bird-girl Rima--a story actual yet fantastic, which immortalizes,
I think, as passionate a love of all beautiful things as ever was
in the heart of man. Somewhere Hudson says: "The sense of the
beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul." So it is: and
to pass that gift on to others, in such measure as herein is
expressed, must surely have been happiness to him who wrote Green
Mansions. In form and spirit the book is unique, a simple
romantic narrative transmuted by sheer glow of beauty into a
prose poem. Without ever departing from its quality of a tale,
it symbolizes the yearning of the human soul for the attainment
of perfect love and beauty in this life--that impossible
perfection which we must all learn to see fall from its high tree
and be consumed in the flames, as was Rima the bird-girl, but
whose fine white ashes we gather that they may be mingled at last
with our own, when we too have been refined by the fire of
death's resignation. The book is soaked through and through with
a strange beauty.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25