Entrancingly beautiful suicide machine. From a scifi anthology of the 1960s?

[PhilSStein]

I'm trying to identify and track down a copy of a story I loved in one of the first scifi anthologies I ever read, which I just happened to pick up at the local library when I was perhaps 11 or 12. It was an anthology published, I believe, sometime between the early 60s and the early 1970s.

My vaguely recollected story synopsis:

Space explorers from Earth arrive on a planet whose highly advanced alien civilization died out aeons ago. In exploring the ruins they discover some kind of clearly essentially important machine. As they explore the planet and try to make sense of the ancient, dead civilization they also attempt to repair their greatest achievement, this vast, highly advanced machine. And then, on a fateful day, they finally finish their work: the machine starts to work, to move! It is the most beautiful, brilliant, astounding, enchanting, bewitching thing ever seen by those who see it, the fulfillment of all qualities, the pinnacle of civilization, thought, delight... so enchanting and enticing they either don't care or, possibly, are even inspired to engage with it, which means being beheaded -- the entire point of the machine.​

Story title and author? Anthology?

THANKS!!

And THANKS HOBBIT!! What a perfect forum topic for a literary, especially scifi, forum!! I grok you!

 

[Hobbit]

And THANKS HOBBIT!! What a perfect forum topic for a literary, especially scifi, forum!! I grok you!

and Thank you, Phil. Can't take all the credit, or even much of the credit, though.

Just wish I could help you with your query, which sounds familiar. Just can't quite place it...

M.