This passage (St Augustine’s Confessions, 10.27) has been translated so many times over the centuries that I figure it is impossible for me to do any better, or to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Just to point out how beautifully symmetrical constructed the last section is, balancing God’s action with Augustine’s, and how free-flowing the style is in Latin, which is something very difficult to reproduce in English punctuation.

Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam … vocasti et clamasti et rupisti surditatem meam: coruscasti, splenduisti et fugasti caecitatem meam: fragrasti, et duxi spiritum, et anhelo tibi, gustavi et esurio et sitio, tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam.

Late have I loved you, beauty ever ancient and ever new, late have I loved you! Behold, you were within and I without, yet there I sought you … You called, and cried out, and ruptured my deafness: You shone and dazzled and chased away my blindness. You sent forth sweet fragrance–I drew breath, and pant after You. I tasted, and hunger and thirst; You touched me, and I burned after Your peace.

One of the most unintentionally funniest passages I had the privilege of reading last semester. From George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.

… Maggie bent her arm a little upward toward the large half-opened rose that had attracted her. Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness. A woman’s arm touched the soul of a great sculptor two thousand years ago, so that he wrought an image of it for the Parthenon which moves us still as it clasps lovingly the timeworn marble of a headless trunk. Maggie’s was such an arm as that, and it had the warm tints of life.