Vernon Lee

Don Juan Gusmán del Pulgar, Count of Miramor, has made a pact with the Virgin of the Seven Daggers, also called Our Lady of Sorrows. He promises to proclaim forever her supreme beauty and asks that in return she save him from damnation. Emboldened by the deal and driven by insatiable greed, he embarks on one final necromantic and obscure escapade to an enchanted palace beneath the Alhambra, where he seeks to attain a hidden treasure and a long dead Moorish princess.

This book takes Beauty as already existing and enjoyed, and seeks to analyze and account for Beauty's existence and enjoyment. More strictly speaking, it analyzes and accounts for Beauty not inasmuch as existing in certain objects and processes, but rather as calling forth (and being called forth by) a particular group of mental activities and habits. It does not ask: What are the peculiarities of the things (and the proceedings) which we call Beautiful? but: What are the peculiarities of our thinking and feeling when in the presence of a thing to which we apply this adjective? The study of single beautiful things, and even more, the comparison of various categories thereof, is indeed one-half of all scientific aesthetics, but only inasmuch as it adds to our knowledge of the particular mental activities which such "Beautiful" (and vice versa "Ugly") things elicit in us. For it is on the nature of this active response on our own part that depends the application of those terms Beautiful and Ugly in every single instance; and indeed their application in any instances whatsoever, their very existence in the human vocabulary.

What would you do if . . . You knew secrets that others would kill to protect? Your parents became people you didn't recognize? A ghostly pair of highway robbers stopped you on a dark road in the dead of night? An old toy crow suddenly came alive, and you were the only one who heard it flying around the attic? Suddenly, you were the only one who could see peril around every turn? In fifteen eerie tales, you will meet the lonely, the troubled, the grieving—the ones who must answer these questions. They have choices; they have fears; they have life . . . and death. They will haunt you long after their stories end