To The Modern Spirit Nothing

The Base Of All Artistic Genius Is The Power Of Conceiving Humanity In A New, Striking, Rejoicing Way, Of Putting A Happy World Ofits Own Creation In Place Of The Meaner World Of Common Days, Of Generating Around Itself An Atmosphere With A Novel Power Of Refraction, Selecting, Transforming, Recombining The Images It Transmits, According To The Choice Of The Imaginative Intellect. In Exercising This Power, Painting And Poetry Have A Choice Of Subject Almost Unlimited.

Product Of A Myriad Various Minds And Contending Tongues, Compact Of Obscure And Minute Association, A Language Has Its Own Abundant And Often Recondite Laws, In The Habitual And Summary Recognition Of Which Scholarship Consists.

In A Sense It Might Even Be Said That Our Failure Is To Form Habits: For, After All, Habit Is Relative To A Stereotyped World, And Meantime It Is Only The Roughness Of The Eye That Makes Two Persons, Things, Situations, Seem Alike.

Through The Survival Of Their Children, Happy Parents Are Able To Think Calmly, And With A Very Practical Affection, Of A World In Which They Are To Have No Direct Share.

No Account Of The Renaissance Can Be Complete Without Some Notice Of The Attempt Made By Certain Italian Scholars Of The Fifteenth Century To Reconcile Christianity With The Religion Of Ancient Greece.