Hiddenness

The hiddenness of perfect things; a shrinking delicacy and mysticism of sentiment (...) the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something illicit and isolating; the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the vulgar--these were some of the impressions, forming as they do, a constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan sentiment, from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old story [the Metamorphoses of Apuleius] enforced on him. A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident ranks with us for something more than its independent value.

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885)