Showiness

“ The clouds delight to change their fashion: (Dear ladies, be not in a passion!) Nor let this whim to you seem strange, Who every hour delight in change. In them and you alike are seen The sullen symptoms of the spleen; The moment that your vapours rise, We see them dropping from your eyes. In evening fair you may behold The clouds are fringed with borrow'd gold; And this is many a lady's case, Who flaunts about in borrow'd lace. ”

“ Each day is divided for them into a hundred little sensual experiences—a passing look, a flitting smile, an accidental contact of the knees—and each year into a hundred such days, in which the sensual experience constitutes the ever-flowing, life-giving and quickening source of their existence. ”

“ The light is let in through a rosy curtain, and the flush as of life falls upon the beautiful form. Two thoughts occurred to me; why, when we gaze upon this form so perfect, so entirely revealed, does it not excite any of those emotions, either of shame or of desire, which the living reality would excite? ”

“ If all the wisdom of the world and all its art—­all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it has snatched from heaven—­were gathered together and divided into heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salon amid the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes ”

“ To seal upon the brain, who in the blood
Are so intense a pulse, so swift a flood
Of beauty, such unceasing instancy.
Dear unimagined brow, unvisioned face,
All beauty has become your dwelling place. ”

“ The freshness of early day, with the glowing colouring which then touched the scenery, gave a pure and exquisite delight to her innocent heart. Born amid scenes of grandeur and sublimity, she had quickly imbibed a taste for their charms, which taste was heightened by the influence of a warm imagination. ”

“ Then the different degrees of beauty in the death-scenes! Life with or without vine-leaves in the hair!—Where, in the name of wonder, do people speak like that, and where in the upper or lower world do they feel like it? ”

“ Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!
In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle,—between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable. ”

“ It is an evening scene, a revelation of the beauty of sadness, an idea expressed in colours—or rather, a real impression of Nature that awakens an ideal feeling in the heart. It does not define everything and say nothing, like so many paintings. ”

“ Then she brushed her hair back from her forehead, and smiling strangely she said to him, ‘What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul. Stand on the sea-shore with thy back to the moon, and cut away from around thy feet thy shadow, which is thy soul’s body, and bid thy soul leave thee, and it will do so.’
The young Fisherman trembled. ”

“ How often you shall see in fancy as you once did in reality, the wonderful opulence of colors! How often, too, you shall behold those glorious curtains that seem to have fallen from the sky and hang poised before you! ”

“ For Beauty must be felt within the “soul.” The senses but convey an impression, the “soul” translates that impression into terms of Ecstacy. For when we come face to face with Beauty, in whatever guise, all that is best and purest in our Nature stirs in response, so that at last our “soul” cannot live without Beauty. ”

“ Lives there, whose soul experiences no degree of delight, is susceptible of no gradations of feelings, at change of scenery? Lives there, who can listen to the cadence of the evening zephyr, and not acknowledge, in his mind, the sensations of celestial melancholy which it awakens? ”

“ No introduction at court, no coronation, no theatrical exhibition, can for a moment compare with it in splendor; nature has shows more beautiful by far than any that man can produce, and all she asks for in exchange is the seeing eye and the feeling heart. ”

“ And as we clothe events with the drapery of our own thoughts, so likewise do we clothe the objects of the visible world around us, and where one sees harmony and beauty, another sees revolting ugliness. ”

“ Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; and their perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied by the shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that is all our art. ”

“ And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the minds of men. ”

“ Your hands rubbing at your knees, your body relaxing in a gentle glow, your eyes set with some gratitude upon the occasion of your comfort, you will drift and pass into another world: a world of the rarest illusions, a world of exquisite and intangible thoughts and fancies. ”

“ He sees splendours, and scenes painted by the hand of the Almighty, for whose faintest imitations the connoisseur would pay the price of an estate. To him every landscape presents beauty; to him every gale breathes pleasure; and every change of scene or season is a new unfolding of enjoyment. ”

“ Let me now, as from an eminence, survey the world stripped of all its false delusive charms. The clear atmosphere enables me to see each object in its true point of view, while my heart is still. I am calm as the prospect in a morning when the mists, slowly dispersing, silently unveil the beauties of nature, refreshed by rest. ”

“ Thus, when we feel either the beauty or sublimity of natural scenery—the gay lustre of a morning in spring, or the mild radiance of a summer-evening—the savage majesty of a wintry storm, or the wild magnificence of the tempestuous ocean—we are conscious of a variety of images in our minds, very different from those which the objects themselves present to the eye. Trains of pleasing or of solemn thought arise spontaneously within our minds; our hearts swell with emotions, of which the objects before us seem to afford no adequate cause ”

“ Hither come ye whose hearts are saddened, or whose nerves are shattered by the strife of life, or the disturbances of the world; inhale the pure air, and gaze awhile on a prospect more redolent of beauty than Claude or Poussin ever painted or saw. Whatever there be of soothing charm in scenery, is here exuberant. ”

“ Every object and scene appeals so forcibly to the senses, enraptures the eye, and so sweetly attunes the mind, as to place this feeling among even the extacies of our nature, and; the most refined we are capable of enjoying. ”

“ Hard eyes grew soft, weary faces brightened, despairing mouths set with new resolve, and when the hour ended there seemed a clearer atmosphere, a different spirit, in the crowded room, than that which earlier had pervaded it. ”

“ First: how an aesthetic impression, intentionally or accidentally conveyed in the course of wholly different interests, can become a constant accompaniment to the shifting preoccupations of existence, like the remembered songs which sing themselves silently in our mind and the remembered landscapes becoming an intangible background to our ever-varying thoughts. ”

“ No; in that noble face, pale from illness or from sadness, with the traces of sorrow upon it, and the marks of long vigils by the bedside of her father—in that refined face, whose expression spoke only of elevation of soul, and exhibited the perfect type of manly beauty, there was certainly nothing that could excite repugnance, but every thing that might inspire confidence. ”

“ The face, small like the face of an old, old child, waxed finer and more spiritual, yet ever more startlingly did it bear the stamp of that individuality which the spirit had held so cheap—the earthly so impenetrated with the spiritual part that the face had become a sublimation. ”

“ With rest and luxury and leisure, her natural gayety and beauty came back to her. Her beauty was not dazzling, indeed, nor her gayety obtrusive; but, united, they were the flower of girlish grace. She still retained a certain tenuity and fragility of aspect, a lightness of tread, a softness of voice, a faintness of coloring, which suggested an intimate acquaintance with suffering. ”

“ And if an actor presents himself in a dress of unusual splendour, the house is in ecstasies, and a roar of applause, loud as a tempest in the Garganian forest, or as the surges on the Tuscan strand, makes the velarium vibrate above their heads. Human nature is perpetually repeating itself. ”

“ In the dusk and shadow he could hear the murmur of subdued voices and now and then a peal of girlish laughter, or the deeper sound of a man's mirth. Young, eager-eyed men and women went by, intent on love-making, their faces shining with youth and the happiness of the unburdened. ”

“ They were altogether free from that vulgar habit of comparing scene with scene which so poisons the eye to all true perception of natural beauty,—as though the one great end were to graduate all the various scenes of nature in the list of a competitive examination. ”

“ This scene must have been one of surpassing sublimity and loveliness. Few doubtless have ever beheld anything that can be compared with it. But perhaps many have felt—I have, often,—that there are occasions in which the sense of the beautiful in nature becomes almost painfully overpowering. ”

“ How often have I beheld, in still mornings, scenes the very essence of beauty, and all bathed in a quiet air of delicious warmth! yet the occasional soft motion imparted a pleasing sensation of coolness as of a fan. ”

“ The feeling for the medium, the sense of what can rightly be done in it only or better than in anything else, and the charm and fascination of doing it so — these, I take it, are the real clue to the fundamental question of aesthetics, which is “how feeling and its body are created adequate to one another.” ”

“ To this purity of aesthetic pleasure must be added its refinement, which implies not merely a certain remoteness from the bodily needs, but the effect of a union of sense and mind in giving amplitude as well as delicacy to our enjoyment of beauty. Marked off from practical activity, As the region of most pure and refined feeling, aesthetic experience is clearly marked off from practical life, with its urgent desires and the rest. In aesthetic contemplation desire and will as a whole are almost dormant. ”

“ The colors of the passing landscape were such as no man in the room had ever beheld; and the people, tall, round-limbed, with florid complexion, golden hair, and brilliant eyes and lips, were indescribably beautiful and graceful in all their movements. ”

“ In a word, the sense of the Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly aroused, and the atmosphere of familiarity and commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted for the hour. ”

“ Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form. ”

“ To reveal ordinary people just as they really are,--sometimes in terrific excitement, sometimes in humdrum routine,--this was his aim. Natural scenery is occasionally introduced, like the mountains in The Cossacks, to show how the spectacle affects the mind of the person who is looking at it. ”

“ Hence, perhaps, the sense of spontaneity in all the work—the sense, when you have looked through his plates, that you have been living in the intimacy of charming people who in their daily ways turn this way and that, stoop, stretch themselves, smile, get suddenly grave, dress themselves, lift their eyes inquiringly, or toss the great long hair upon their shoulders. ”

“ Not one of those short winter days went by without the discovery of some new trait or little vanity to astonish or delight him,—sometimes an unlooked-for tenderness toward the weak, often a sweet, untainted philosophy of life, or perhaps just a lowering of her eyelids in which her eyes would show lustrous through the lashes, or some sweeping, exuberant gesture startlingly graceful. ”

“ But when we have looked into the depths of this well-spring of health, we understand how her thoughts gush forth, flashing and plashing, as freely and inevitably as the jets of a fountain rise into the air. She evokes and discards image after image, as one plucks and throws away flowers in a luxuriant garden. ”

“ Be this last as it may, it is certain that the emotion connected with the word Beautiful can be evoked by that word alone, and without an accompanying act of visual or auditive perception. Indeed beautiful shapes would lose much of their importance in our life, if they did not leave behind them such emotional traces, capable of revival under emotionally appropriate, though outwardly very dissimilar, circumstances; and thereby enormously increasing some of our safest, perhaps because our most purely subjective, happiness. ”

“ The large liquid eyes, swimming sometimes with strange lustre, and often varying in colour, the delicate flush which any pulse of emotion drives glowing into the somewhat pale face, give to him an almost girlish aspect, and tell the tale of a weakened constitution. ”

“ No expression is equal to it in the truest charm, for quiet contentment is the atmosphere which in the future, whatever may be her lot, ought to be diffused by her presence, an atmosphere of security and rest. ”

“ Must we forego the sunshine of our enjoyments for anything resembling this melancholy gloom? Must the sparkling eye set in haggard dimness? the lovely features and glowing cheeks be obscured by pale deformity? ”