The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts

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Houghton Mifflin, 1910 - Philosophy - 258 pages
 

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Page 113 - L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
Page 16 - In fine, I was a better judge of thoughts than words, Misled in estimating words, not only By common inexperience of youth, But by the trade in classic niceties, The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase From languages that want the living voice To carry meaning to the natural heart ; To tell us what is passion, what is truth. What reason, what simplicity and sense.
Page 113 - La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles ; L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Page 107 - ... at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical penna duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound. Thus, the 'echoing walks between,' may be almost said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.
Page 92 - He has only felt during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume sympathetically ; " and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of ; but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was...
Page 150 - C'est sous Louis treize ; et je crois voir s'étendre Un coteau vert, que le couchant jaunit, Puis un château de brique à coins de pierre, Aux vitraux teints de rougeâtres couleurs, Ceint de grands parcs, avec une rivière Baignant ses pieds, qui coule entre des fleurs ; Puis une dame, à sa haute fenêtre, Blonde aux yeux noirs, en ses habits anciens, Que, dans une autre existence peut-être, J'ai déjà vue... et dont je me souviens!
Page 106 - The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instil that energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture.
Page 75 - There is surely a piece of divinity in us ; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.
Page 82 - Reason would become captive and servile, if eloquence of persuasions did not practise and win the imagination from the affections...
Page 181 - Yet in spite of the naturalists, scientific and sen- / / / timental, we must insist not only that there is a law -, for man as well as a law for thing, but that the actual reason may be given why the two laws are discrete and unreconciled. If man as a natural phenomenon grows by expanding, man as man grows by concentrating. He proves that he is set above nature, not so much by his power to act, as by his power to refrain from acting.

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