You ask me why I like the landscape? Because it carries me back into past times when men believed in nymphs and in satyrs. I have always thought it must be a wonderful thing to believe in the dryad. Do you know that men wandering in the woods sometimes used to catch sight of a white breast between the leaves, and henceforth they could love no mortal woman? The beautiful name of their malady was nympholepsy. A disease that every one would like to catch.
A Commonplace Book of Quotations and Translations
Mostly Literary, Sometimes Philosophical, Often From the Belle Époque
11 December 2012
A Disease Everyone Would Like to Catch
George Moore, Memoirs of My Dead Life (London: Heinemann, 1906), p. 140: