So the most beautiful of the goddesses became the wife of the most ill-favored of gods. […] He talked with the supposed spirit: “Why, beautiful being, do you shun me? […] It was not only beautiful when it was done, but beautiful also in the doing. […] As she ran she looked more beautiful than ever. […] I pity him, not for his beauty (yet he is beautiful,) but for his youth.

At all events neither Homer nor Hesiod evinces any knowledge of the beautiful fiction of the solar cup or basin. […] Leda was beguiled by him in the shape of a beautiful white swan. […] The physical union of earth and heaven is, we think, plainly discernible in the beautiful passage of Homer above noticed. […] The object selected was Anchises, a beautiful youth of the royal house of Troy, who was at that time with the herdsmen feeding oxen among the hills and valleys of Ida. […] The Venus de’ Medici remains to us a noble specimen of ancient art and perception of the beautiful.