Essays on the Fine Arts

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Reeves and Turner, 1873 - Art - 470 pages

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Page 243 - The birds their quire apply; airs, vernal airs, Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune The trembling leaves; while universal Pan, Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance^ Led on the eternal spring.
Page 465 - And fast by, hanging in a golden chain, This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.
Page 143 - Four acres was the' allotted space of ground, Fenced with a green enclosure all around : Tall thriving trees confess'd the fruitful mould ; The reddening apple ripens here to gold : Here the blue fig with luscious juice o'erflows, With deeper red the full pomegranate glows, The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear, And verdant olives flourish round the year.
Page 117 - Till body up to spirit work, in bounds Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk; from thence the leaves More airy; last the bright consummate flower Spirits odorous breathes...
Page 131 - Those raptures duly — Erebus disdains: Calm pleasures there abide — majestic pains. 'Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control Rebellious passion: for the Gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul; A fervent, not ungovernable, love. Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn When I depart, for brief is my sojourn —
Page 260 - O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made them and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
Page 159 - Come then, the colours and the ground prepare ! Dip in the Rainbow, trick her off in Air ; Choose a firm Cloud, before it fall, and in it Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.
Page 462 - Sacred City:" — might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope : it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart : it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination : it stands in lowly sublimity, on the "hill of ages;" and points with prophetic fingers to the sky : it greets the eager gaze from afar, " with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned...
Page 82 - Fairy Queen; in which he very early took delight to read, till by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called genius. The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.

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