Lyrics by Frank DiGiacomo and Julian R. Pace, drawn from The Sleeping Beauty, a poem by Walter de la Mare,
republished in America by Dover Publications in a collection entitled Songs of Childhood.
Photography by Sherry Eckstein.

After Beauty gently refuses the Beast’s first proposal, she ascends to her bedchamber, where her animal servants help her to prepare for sleep. While she does so, the Beast remains kneeling, with bowed head, below in the main hall.

At last he rises and muses protectively and tenderly on the tableau of Beauty sleeping.

LYRICS
Beast:    
        The scent of bramble sweets the air, amid her folded sheets she lies,
        the gold of evening in her hair, the blue of morn shut in her eyes.
 
        How many a changing moon hath lit the unchanging roses of her face!
        Her mirror ever broods on it in silver stillness of the days.
 
        Oft flits the moth on filmy wings into his solitary lair;
        shrill evensong the cricket sings from some still shadow,
        from some still shadow in her hair,
        from some still shadow in her hair.
 
        In heat, in snow, in wind, in flood, she sleeps in lovely loneliness,
        half folded like an April bud on winter-haunted trees.
 
        I place my hope, my life,
        in your gentle heart,
        in your gentle eyes.

(He turns and contemplates the tableau of Beauty asleep,attended by her animal servants
and guarded by two reindeer lords, as the curtain falls.)