Manifest content

“ It is in the writings of these illustrious characters that we find originality of thought, justice of sentiment, and force of reasoning, occasionally elevating our conceptions, convincing our judgments, and softening our feelings. Many more examples might be adduced of those who prefer the exercise of composition to that of conversation, and who, in silently meditating upon some rational subject, and in recording the spontaneous flow of ideas and reflections, have felt a silent satisfaction, and an enlargement of mind, never found among the restraints, or the gaieties of society. ”

“ The essential meaning, truth, beauty, and irony of things may be revealed under all these forms. Vision over life and human nature can be as keen and just, the revelation as true, inspiring, delight-giving, and thought-provoking, whatever fashion be employed—it is simply a question of doing it well enough to uncover the kernel of the nut. ”

“ II. You must love the creation you work in the midst of. For, wholly in proportion to the intensity of feeling which you bring to the subject you have chosen, will be the depth and justice of our perception of its character. ”

“ For—how shall I express it?—the fruit of living is experience, and experience tends more and more to lose sight of the concrete in the abstract, to replace the substance of the form with the higher reality of the idea. ”

“ A fine skill in apprehending the secret relations of Thought with Thought—relations along which the mind moves with creative power, to find out for its own use, and for the use of all minds to come, some hitherto uncreated expression of an idea—an image—a sentiment—a passion! ”

“ In virtue of man's access to Reason or the Whole, the human form is a pledge of wholeness, suggests to our imagination the perfection of truth or goodness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or imperfection. ”

“ But when we ask what reality Nature possesses, we must beware of letting our social interests, and the general motives that lead us to conceive the World of Description, blind us to the true principles upon which an interpretation of experience should be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation, — we have seen from what motives in our own lives all such contrasts result. ”

“ And reflection makes an idea, independent of this or that sensuous thing, which remains ready to rise before us, and so provokes temptation, and reacts upon habit to the further intensification of both. The self is made one with the bad by abiding habit and lasting idea, and thus gets a content, not past but present, which is discrepant with the content of the good will. ”

“ It is never the contents, the substance, that gains by the beauty of form; nor is it the understanding that is helped by taste in the act of knowing. The substance, the contents, must commend themselves to the understanding directly, of themselves; whilst the beautiful form speaks to the imagination, and flatters it with an appearance of freedom. ”

“ The seventh, and final, "quality" is body or figure, by which he means the fundamental tendency or energy toward expression in actuality and concrete form. The final goal of intelligent purpose is the realization of wisdom, of idea, in actual Nature-forms and life-forms—the incarnation of the spirit. ”

“ Of these it may be said, that their form is their essence, and their object, the production of pleasure in their contemplation. This is their final end. They are as much the product of genius and the result of composition, as are the lines of the poet or the historian's period. ”

“ And so, whatever you regard as a genuine test of the workings of your ideas is some living whole of experience above the level of any one of our individual human lives. To this whole you indeed actively appeal. The appeal is an act of will. And in turn you regard that to which you appeal as an experience which is just as live and concrete as your own, and which carries out its own will in that it snubs or welcomes your efforts with a will as hearty as is your own. For what estimates your deeds, {151} and gives them their meaning, is a life as genuine as yours and an activity as real as yours. ”

“ They say to you, oh Poet, ‘Perfect those gifts of your higher nature—yet be not of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.’ Look upon every beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression. ”

“ I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind. ”

“ From the crudest impressions of the boy to the ripest convictions of the man, one common quality informs and harmonizes every stage of thought, every phase of feeling, every change of spiritual outlook, which has left its mark on the writings of which that collection is composed; the quality of a pure, a perfect, an intense and burning sincerity. ”

“ We see in them every kind of beauty combined; beauty of mind and character as well as of person. All their actions, even those which are unconscious, exhibit a spontaneous striving for ideal perfection. ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say, any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ Again and again she stirs in the reader a kind of surprised gladness of the simple perfection wherewith she utters, by few and adequate words, a thought that in its quietness convinces of truth, or an emotion deep in life. ”

“ Let us rend the melancholy veil which hides from our eyes the eternal chain of the world and the glory of the Creator.... External objects form ideas in the mind, these ideas form sentiments, these sentiments volitions, these volitions actions in ourselves and outside of ourselves. ”

“ A mind, which itself lives in the light, will, by its own sincerity, make the subject which it attempts to expound clear; and he had this faculty, eminently, of making abstruse truths shine out with luminous, and distinct beauty. ”

“ As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,—not the first thought that comes,—so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,—not the first passion that comes."
When we add to this deep feeling and sympathy the versatile poetic imagination which freely constructs all phases of social life and conduct, we have that union of the great powers of the mind and heart which give such concentrated ethical energy to the best literature. ”

“ We are not only "in matter," therefore, but we sub-create the matter, through our God-given modes of sensuous receptivity, and can only escape from it through an entire change of those modes, called "senses." ”

“ The pleasant feeling which is to result from an act may be presented in imagination, and thought of as the end to be reached; or the thought of myself to be pleased as much as possible generally, and here by such means and in such a way, may be the end which I take as the principle and motive of my action. ”

“ The reason why such ideas delight the imagining soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own perfection—of itself become perfect—in one aspect or another. These aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life and outward existence ”

“ A high, pure tone of morality pervades each set of verses, and each strikes the reader as inspired by some real event, or condition of mind, and not by some idle fancy or fleeting sentiment.”—Spectator. ”

“ These expressions of the divine urge within the evolving creature may be intellectually true, emotionally beautiful, and spiritually good; but the real soul of expression is absent unless these realities of truth, meanings of beauty, and values of goodness are unified in the life experience of the artisan, the scientist, or the philosopher. ”

“ We should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely, to recreate and exalt the mind with a prospect of the beauty, order, extent, and variety of natural things: hence, by proper inferences, to enlarge our notions of the grandeur, wisdom, and beneficence of the Creator," etc., etc., etc. ”

“ By the side of the intellectual element, by which we estimate our thoughts and actions, there is feeling; that is, the sensibility which modifies the judgment and enlightens the deep thought determining our responsibility. ”

“ How shall I rise through words, which are mere symbols, to conceptions, which, not being in my own soul, mere words do not suggest? If I saw a living being embodying these sublime conceptions before me, or read a description of him that brought him vividly before the soul, then the words would be no longer clothed with my poor meanings, but would bring before me the living forms of goodness and of greatness into which they expanded when represented by that heavenly mind. ”

“ Mind as creator appealed to her less than mind as recorder, reasoner, and ruler; and for one gem of poetry or other beauty of purely literary value which she quotes, there are fifty records of principles of action. ”

“ And when we find words continually adding themselves to our vocabulary and our culture, we know ourselves increasing in the knowledge of ourselves and of the beauty and passion which lie latent in our souls. ”

“ In order to yield satisfaction, the different parts of life must exemplify identity of motive, continuity and orderliness in the fulfillment of purpose, lucidity of relation, yet diversity for stimulation and totality. ”

“ In an especial manner must the personification of Sentiment, of the Abstract, which owe their interest to the common desire of rendering permanent, by embodying, that which has given us pleasure, take its starting-point from the Actual; from something which, by universal association or particular expression, shall recall the Sentiment, Thought, or Time, and serve as their exponents; there being scarcely an object in Nature which the spirit of man has not, as it were, impressed with sympathy, and linked with his being. ”

“ The commonest objection which the doctrine there laid down runs up against is drawn from the existence of our ‘affections.’ In our pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance or preciousness of certain objects and situations, we have, I am told by many critics, a great realm of experience intuitively recognized as spiritual, made, and felt to be made, of consciousness exclusively, and different in nature from the space-filling kind of being which is enjoyed by physical objects. ”

“ It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its partial manifestation. ‘All,’ I say: for the splendour of nature, the love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law, the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by superstitious religion,—all are equally operations or appearances of the hidden power. ”

“ They will find in them a truth to nature—a freshness and raciness of thought and diction—a freedom from the hackneyed conventionalisms of ordinary story-telling, a descriptive and dramatic power, which lend to them an unfailing charm. ”

“ Such a comprehensive world, together with the human characterization it embraces, must then pass before us as real in a tranquil stream, without any undue haste, either as positive history or dramatic action, towards its aim and conclusion. ”

“ The beautiful is that which excites in us the emotion of beauty, a state of mind with which we are acquainted by experience. This state of mind has been successfully analysed, and shewn to consist of a train of pleasurable ideas, awakened in us by the beautiful object.
“But is it in this way only that we are concerned in moral acts? Do we value them for nothing, but as we value a picture, or a piece of music, for the pleasure of looking at them, or hearing them? Everybody knows the contrary. Acts are objects of importance to us, on account of their 317 consequences, and nothing else. ”

“ To most readers new emotions and unaccustomed trains of thought spring up in the mind, awakening and enkindling the desire for deeper and fuller insight into the great truths there brought to view; and as one proceeds ideas continually cluster around the mind with all the interest and freshness which novelty and a deep insight into our nature can give them. ”

“ We should fear to attempt the task: and it is not needed: the world is full of such descriptions, in prose and in verse, on the canvas and in marble,—in every form in which the sentiments of the heart are sought to be rendered visible, or intelligible by outward expression: this universal and absorbing passion has been the theme of poets and of artists, since the world began. But for a still stronger reason is such description unnecessary—namely, that the sentiment itself is known to all by a more certain information than the most eloquent description could supply—experience. ”

“ And since all these three elements are in reality one element, which is indeed nothing less than the dominant outflowing of the soul itself, it follows that those portions of the soul's outflowing which have been directed by reason and by conscience, which we call the idea of truth and the idea of goodness, must have an ultimate identity with that portion of the soul's outflowing which has been directed by the aesthetic sense and which we call the idea of beauty. ”