United States or Australia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is true we are crude and young. Behold the Derricks like mighty Youths! In our glorious adolescence so sublime, so ugly, so believing, will no one sing a hymn to the Derricks? Where are the dear little Poets? Where are they hiding? Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks. Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first.
He replied "How do you like Greece? Don't you think that some of these ruins are rather out of shape in the popular mind? Now, for my part, I would rather look at a good strong finish at a horserace than to see ten thousand Parthenons in a bunch." She was immediately in the position of defending him from himself. "You would rather see no such thing. You shouldn't talk in that utterly trivial way.
Hope, therefore, most, and cheeriest smile, at the very apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel, and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropics and turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when He falls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to His feet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are but the stepping-stones and rough scaffolding from which He builds His Parthenons, and from the densest basalt gush His rills, and the last end of this Earth shall be no poison-cloud, I say to you, but Carnival and Harvest-home ... though ye have sinned, poor hearts ...
We may wish that Parthenons and cathedrals were within our souls; but what the cathedral said of an age that had the cathedral mood, that had a cathedral civilization and thrones and popes in it, we are bound to say in some stupendous fashion of our own something which, when it is built at last, will be left worshipping upon the ground beneath the sky when we are dead, as a memorial that we too have lived.
For my part, I never could understand this love for the common-place and the hideous. I know that every one does not dwell in Alhambras, Louvres, or Parthenons, but it is so easy to do without a clock to leave the walls bare, to exist without Manrin's lithographs or Jazet's aquatints!
Now your general glance gives you picturesque stretches of gleaming water, on your left, with a sail here and there and a lunatic asylum on shore; over beyond the water, on a distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which made it blest and beautiful.
The nervous electric signs that wink and do tricks throw an intermittent glare over the windows. Do you know the dark windows of the city, you gentlemen who write continually of temples and art? Come, forget your love for things you never saw, cathedrals and parthenons that exist in the yesterdays you never knew.
I abominate this setting up of Sculpture above Painting, of the Greeks above the Italians, as if all Eastern civilization, all Christian truth, had taught art nothing, as if there was not more real beauty in a French cathedral or a Venetian palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul in one Rafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the Greek statues of the Tribune or Vatican.
"tas parthenons ton metoikon skiadaephorein en tais rompais aenankazon." Its use seems to have been confined to women. In Pausanias there is a description of a tomb near Pharæ, a Greek city. On the tomb was the figure of a woman "themapaina de autae prosestaeke skiadeion pherousa." Aristophanes seems to mention it among the common articles of female use
Now your general glance gives you picturesque stretches of gleaming water, on your left, with a sail here and there and a lunatic asylum on shore; over beyond the water, on a distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which made it blest and beautiful.
Word Of The Day