Ecstasy: entry for August 26 from 'Words and days : a table-book of prose and verse' by Bowyer Nichols (1895)

Bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs,
Yet from mine ear the templing tune is blown
Venus and Adonis

 
THE ideal, cheerful, sensuous. Pagan life is not sick or sorry. No ; yet its natural end is the sort of life which Pompeii and Herculaneum bring so vividly before us, — a life which by no means in itself suggests the thought of horror and misery, which even, in many ways, gratifies the senses and the understanding ; but by the very intensity and unremittingness of its appeal to the senses and the understanding, by its stimulating a single side of us too absolutely, ends by fatiguing and revolting us ; ends by leaving us with a sense of confinement, of oppression, — with a desire for an utter change, for clouds, storms, effusion, and relief. 

Matthew Arnold.

I FLUNG away, and with full cry 

Of wild affections, rid 

In post for pleasures, bent to try 

All gamesters that would bid. I played with fire, did counsel spurn, 

Made life my common stake ; 

But never thought that fire would burn. 

Or that a soul could ache. 

Henry Vaughan