The man who has exquisite gifts of expression passes for more, popularly, than the man with great and grand ideas who utters but imperfectly.
 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854). copy citation

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Author Harriet Beecher Stowe
Source Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands
Topic expression gift
Date 1854
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6931/pg6931-images.html

Context

“while others, in which every condition of art seems to be met, inspire no strong emotion. Yet this picture is immensely popular. Hundreds stand enchanted before it, and declare it imbodies their highest ideal of art and religion; and I suppose it does. But so it always is. The man who has exquisite gifts of expression passes for more, popularly, than the man with great and grand ideas who utters but imperfectly. There are some pictures here by Correggio—a sleeping Venus and Cupid—a marriage of the infant Jesus and St. Catharine. This Correggio is the poet of physical beauty. Light and shadow are his god. What he lives for is, to catch and reproduce fitting phases of these.” source