All Art Constantly Aspires Towards The Condition

To Higher Or Lower Ends, They [the Majority Of Mankind] Move Too Often With Something Of A Sad Countenance, With Hurried And Ignoble Gait, Becoming, Unconsciously, Something Like Thorns, In Their Anxiety To Bear Grapes; It Being Possible For People, In The Pursuit Of Even Great Ends, To Become Themselves Thin And Impoverished In Spirit And Temper, Thus Diminishing The Sum Of Perfection In The World, At Its Very Sources.

But When Reflexion Begins To Play Upon These Objects... Like Some Trick Of Magic Each Object Is Loosed Into A Group Of Impressions - Colour, Odour, Texture... And If We Continue To Dwell In Thought On This World... The Whole Scope Of Observation Is Dwarfed Into The Narrow Chamber Of The Individual Mind.

Through The Survival Of Their Children, Happy Parents Are Able To Think Calmly, And With A Very Practical Affection, Of A World In Which They Are To Have No Direct Share.

In Truth, The Legitimate Contention Is, Not Of One Age Or School Of Literary Art Against Another, But Of All Successive Schools Alike, Against The Stupidity Which Is Dead To The Substance, And The Vulgarity Which Is Dead To Form.

Not To Discriminate Every Moment Some Passionate Attitude In Those About Us, And In The Very Brilliancy Of Their Gifts Some Tragic Dividing Of Forces On Their Ways, Is, On This Short Day Of Frost And Sun, To Sleep Before Evening. With This Sense Of The Splendour Of Our Experience And Of Its Awful Brevity, Gathering All We Are Into One Desperate Effort To See And Touch, We Shall Hardly Have Time To Make Theories About The Things We See And Touch.