The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is a classic poetry collection by Aldous Huxley. She leans, and there is laughter in the face She turns towards him; and it seems a door Suddenly opened on some desolate place With a burst of light and music.

"Miss Spence will be down directly, sir." "Thank you," said Mr. Hutton, without turning round. Janet Spence's parlourmaid was so ugly-ugly on purpose, it always seemed to him, malignantly, criminally ugly-that he could not bear to look at her more than was necessary. The door closed. Left to himself, Mr. Hutton got up and began to wander round the room, looking with meditative eyes at the familiar objects it contained.

There had been phantoms, pale-remembered shapes Of this and this occasion, sisterly In their resemblances, each effigy Crowned with the same bright hair above the nape's White rounded firmness, and each body alert With such swift loveliness, that very rest Seemed a poised movement: ... phantoms that impressed But a faint influence and could bless or hurt No more than dreams. And these ghost things were she; For formless still, without identity, Not one she seemed, not clear, but many and dim. One face among the legions of the street, Indifferent mystery, she was for him Something still...

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley. Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parodic version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write. The book contains a brief pre-figuring of Huxley's later novel, Brave New World. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system. In...