In one, the sacred parturition scene,
A happy, painless mother births a perfect child.”
—Walt Whitman (“Autumn Rivulets”).
Id.... “I am so rapt in the beauty of the human form, and so earnestly, so inexpressibly prayerful to see that form perfect, that my full thought is not to be written.... It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities.... When the ambition of the multitude is fixed on the ideal form and beauty, then that ideal will become immediately possible, and a marked advance towards it could be made in three generations.”—Richard Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” pp. 32, 151, 131).
Id....
“‘The Gods?’ In yourselves will ye see them, when Venus shall favour your love,
And man, fitly mated with woman, believes that his love is divine:
When passion shall elevate woman to something so holy and grand
That she—the ideal enraptured—shall ne’er be a check upon Man,
Then the children they bear will be holy, and beauty shall make them her own,