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“ With all the great objects removed which could excite a true spirit of poetry, they devoted themselves to minute researches in all sciences subordinate to literature proper. They studied criticism, grammar, prosody and metre, antiquities and mythology. The results of this study constantly appear in their productions. Their works are never national, never addressed to a people, but to a circle of learned men. ”

“ AGRICULTURE (from Lat. ager, field, and colere, to cultivate) , the science, art and industry of utilizing the soil so as to produce the means of human subsistence, embracing in its widest sense the rearing of live-stock as well as the raising of crops. The history of agriculture is the history of man in his most primitive, and most permanent aspect. Hence the nations of antiquity ascribed to it a divine origin; Brahma in Hindustan, Isis in Egypt, Demeter in Greece, and Ceres in Italy, were its founders. ”

“ On the whole the influence of the French Academy has been conservative rather than creative. It has done much by its example for style, but its attempts to impose its laws on language have, from the nature of the case, failed. For, however perfectly a dictionary or a grammar may represent the existing language of a nation, an original genius is certain to arise—-a Victor Hugo or an Alfred de Musset—who will set at defiance all dictionaries and academic rules. ”

“ Nay, with the wafting gale of your sighs, my sisters, Beat on your heads with your hands the stroke as of oars, The stroke that passes ever across Acheron, Speeding on its way the black-robed sacred bark,— The bark Apollo comes not near, The bark that is hidden from the sunlight— To the shore of darkness that welcomes all! ”

“ In Brittany the people flock into the cemeteries at nightfall to kneel bare-headed at the graves of their loved ones, and to toll the hollow of the tombstone with holy water or to pour libations of milk upon it, and at bedtime the supper is left on the table for the soul's refreshment. ”

“ That city, founded by Alexander the Great about the time when Greece, in losing her national independence, lost also her intellectual supremacy, was in every way admirably adapted for becoming the new centre of the world's activity and thought. Its situation brought it into commercial relations with all the nations lying around the Mediterranean, and at the same time rendered it the one communicating link with the wealth and civilization of the East. The great natural advantages it thus enjoyed were artificially increased to an enormous extent by the care of the sovereigns of Egypt. ”

“ A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No—that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. ”

“ According to Schelling a new philosophical significance is given to art by the doctrine that the identity of subject and object—which is half disguised in ordinary perception and volition—is only clearly seen in artistic perception. The perfect perception of its real self by intelligence in the work of art is accompanied by a feeling of infinite satisfaction. Art in thus effecting a revelation of the absolute seems to attain a dignity not merely above that of nature but above that of philosophy itself. Schelling throws but little light on the concrete forms of beauty. ”

“ Modern history knows no more tragic figure than that of Alexander. The brilliant promise of his early years; the haunting memory of the crime by which he had obtained the power to realize his ideals; and, in the end, the terrible legacy he left to Russia: a principle of government which, under lofty pretensions, veiled a tyranny supported by spies and secret police; an uncertain succession; an army permeated by organized disaffection; an armed Poland, whose hunger for liberty the tsar had whetted but not satisfied; the quarrel with Turkey, with its alternative of war or humiliation for Russia ”

“ ALGIERS (Fr. Alger, Arab. Jezair, i.e. The Islands) , capital and largest city of Algeria, North Africa, seat of the governor- general, of a court of appeal, and of an archbishop, and station of the French XIX. corps d'armee. It is situated on the west side of a bay of the Mediterranean, to which it gives its name, in 36 deg. 47' N., 3 deg. 4' E., and is built on the slopes of the Sahel, a chain of hills parallel to the coast. The view of the city from the sea is one of great beauty. Seen from a distance it appears like a succession of dazzling white terraces rising from the water's edge. ”

“ A mere glance at the facts will suffice to convince us that we do not. We call the facade of a Greek temple beautiful with special reference to its admirable form; whereas in predicating beauty of the ruin of a Norman castle we refer rather to what the ruin means—-to the effect of an imagination of its past proud strength and slow vanquishment by the unrelenting strokes of time. ”

“ A thing is translucent when it merely admits the passage of light, without enabling us to distinguish the color and outline of objects through it; it is transparent when we can clearly discern objects placed on the other side of it. ”

“ An obstacle rises before us in our path, and we surmount or remove it. A difficulty sets before us something hard to be done, and we encounter it and overcome it. A hindrance holds us back for a time, but we break away from it. ”

“ Nature, moreover, in spreading out her spaces of earth, sea and sky, and in exhibiting the action of her forces, does so on a scale which seems to make sublimity her prerogative in which art vainly endeavours to participate. ”

“ Lipps and others who follow him seek to show that this vitalizing activity of the fancy, which produces a new and illusory object, is the essential ingredient in the aesthetic enjoyment of the forms of material objects. According to this theory, when in the aesthetic mood I enjoy the form of a tree, of a church steeple or of the front of a Greek temple, I am not only ascribing life and feeling to it, but am projecting myself in fancy into the object thus constructed, feeling for the moment that I am the tree or the steeple. ”