Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.
If with love thy heart has burned; If thy love is unreturned; Hide thy grief within thy breast, Though it tear thee unexpressed; For when love has once departed From the eyes of the false-hearted, And one by one has torn off quite The bandages of purple light; Though thou wert the loveliest Form the soul had ever dressed, Thou shalt seem, in each reply, A vixen to his altered eye; Thy softest pleadings seem too bold, Thy praying lute will seem to scold; Though thou kept the straightest road, Yet thou errest far and broad.
The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.
All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.
In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.
To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.
Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable. .. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both.
Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.