The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

So Kennaston seemed to have got only disappointment and vexation and gainless vague regret from his love-affairs in the flesh; and all fleshly passion seemed to flicker out inevitably, however splendid the brief blaze. For you loved and lost; or else you loved and won: there was quick ending either way. And afterward unaccountable women haunted you, and worried you into unreasonable contrition, in defiance of common-sense.

But for Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human faculties were competent to understand, he must hunger always in vain. Whatever happened, Ettarre stayed inaccessible, even in dreams: her beauty was his to look on only; and always when he came too near that radiant loveliness which was Ettarre's -- that perfect beauty which was so full of troubling reticences, and so, was touched with something sinister -- the dream would end, and the universe would seem to fold about him, just as a hand closes. Such was the law, the kindly law, as Kennaston now believed, through which love might thrive even in the arid heart of a poet.