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The same spirit of exclusive attention to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history.
These are the conditions of life which the refined man of all ages has set before him as the thing above all others to be attained. Too often he has been so foiled in their pursuit that he has turned longing eyes backward to the days before civilization, when man's sole business was getting himself food from day to day, and hope was dormant in him, or at least could not be expressed by him.
Even the passions described by Ovid, which arose amidst the freer manners of the Roman patricians, had little resemblance to the refined sentiments, the bequest of the age of chivalry; the one was founded on the subjugation of mind by the senses, the other on the oblivion of the senses in the mind.
There is passion, refined and swelling, in the curves of this most eloquent composition. It is Chopin at the supreme summit of his art, an art alembicated, personal and intoxicating. I know of nothing in music like the F minor Ballade.
I don't deny that I'm a trifle selfish myself, of course, in a refined and cultivated manner I flatter myself, in fact, that introspective analysis is one of my strong points; and I don't conceal my own failings from my own consciousness with any weak girlish prevarications. Now I will NOT give way to the foolish and selfish impulses which would lead me to marry Selah Briggs.
This is at work a distinct tendency to substitute the subdued for the gaudy, the refined for the meretricious, the quiet for the loud; and even now the cultured American who knows his monde may spend a great part of his time in hotels without conspicuously lowering the tone of his environment.
He admired her perfect taste in dress she was all in pure white, muslin and laces, and he knew it was of the best, and the creation of the greatest artist. She looked just what his wife ought to look, infinitely refined and slender and stately and fair. Morella Winmarleigh would seem as a large dun cow beside her.
The girl must always be lovely and refined and moving in the best society; elopement with the coachman preferred, varied with a teacher in a Sunday-school. Invented? Not always. It was surprising how many you could find ready made, if you were on the watch.
Her twenty-three-year-old lord, whose good-looking face had been adorned and made positively handsome by a sweeping brown moustache, had, since our last meeting, "raised" an uneven crop of reddish whiskers that shortened a face somewhat too round, and altogether vulgarized what had been refined. "No, indeed! He knows, as I do, that it disfigures him.
Adelaide assumed that one remained in the state of mind called Joralemon all one's life; that, however famous he might be, the son of Oscar Ericson was not sufficiently refined for Miss Cowles of the Big House on the Hill, though he might improve under Cowles influences. He was still a person who had run away from Plato!
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