Page:Vivian Grey, Volume 2.djvu/77

 and the purple lake reflecting in its lustrous bosom another heaven! Is it not a fair scene?"

"Beautiful! Oh, most beautiful!"

"Yet, Vivian, where is the being for whom all this beauty existeth? Where is your mighty creature—Man? The peasant on his rough couch enjoys, perchance, slavery's only service-money—sweet sleep; or, waking in the night, curses at the same time his lot and his lord. And that lord is restless on some downy couch; his night thoughts, not of this sheeny lake and this bright moon, but of some miserable creation of man's artifice, some mighty nothing, which Nature knows not of, some offspring of her bastard child—Society. Why then is Nature loveliest when man looks not on her? For whom, then, Vivian Grey, is this scene so fair?"

"For poets, lady; for philosophers; for all those superior spirits who require some relaxation from the world's toils; spirits who only