..a man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box....the sounds filled me with the strangest emotion. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of The Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a corner. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth....the
more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our
fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song
of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the
fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in The Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.
— W. B. Yeats, "The Golden Age"