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I do not see, if I may continue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of the same community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations of life, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all that the belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men's lives, are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of fortunate lives, aesthetic and intellectual goods may be more important than among the common people, these are less penetrating and go not to the core, which remains life as all know it a thing of affection, of resolve, of service, of use to those to whom it may be of human use.

Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic than aesthetic.

There was a great outburst of intellectual activity and aesthetic energy. The amazing discoveries of Newton seemed to open out boundless possibilities of speculation; and in the meantime the great nobles were building palaces and reviving the magnificence of the Augustan Age, while men of letters filled the offices of State.

The rhetoric comedies were not admirable in an aesthetic point of view, but they were wrathful and sincere. Therefore they cost many thousand lives, but they sowed the seed of resistance to religious tyranny, to spring up one day in a hundredfold harvest. It was natural that the authorities should have long sought to suppress these perambulating dramas.

It got into eyes and they grew red and smarting. It stopped ear and nostril. It lined the mouth; it sifted down the neck and made the body miserable. At the starting, as the men quit the green banks of Shenandoah, several of the aesthetic sort had been heard to comment upon the beauty of the scenery. Possibly the soul for beauty lasted, but as for the scenery, it vanished.

With regard to the other needs of the mind, and especially to those of the senses, this book, on the other hand, affords unusual satisfaction. Accordingly, it must be, and will be so, that this book will remain justly one of the favorite works of our age, and of all epochs when men only write aesthetic works to please, and people only read to get pleasure.

To the poet these impressions cannot be distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the "aesthetic repose."

"Are you ill?" "No, there ain't anything the matter," said the old man. "But I guess I'll lay down on your settee a minute." He tottered with Beaton's help to the aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had once thought of painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get the right model.

The spirit of art, no less than of religion, can help us to triumph over the evils of life. There are three ways of treating evil successfully: the practical way, to overcome it and destroy it; the religious way, by faith to deny its existence; the aesthetic way, to rebuild it in the imagination.

It is an unquestioned fact that the growing luxury of the times did benefit trade with that doubtful benefit which accompanies the diversion of capital from purposes of permanent utility to objects of aesthetic admiration or temporary display; but it is an equally unquestioned fact that this unhealthy nutriment did not strengthen to any appreciable extent such of the lower classes as could boast pure Roman blood.