Every Intellectual Product Must Be

At First Sight Experience Seems To Bury Us Under A Flood Of External Objects, Pressing Upon Us With A Sharp And Importunate Reality, Calling Us Out Of Ourselves In A Thousand Forms Of Action.

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.

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.

For Us Necessity Is Not As Of Old An Image Without Us, With Whom We Can Do Warfare; It Is A Magic Web Woven Through And Through Us, Like That Magnetic System Of Which Modern Science Speaks, Penetrating Us With A Network Subtler Than Our Subtlest Nerves, Yet Bearing In It The Central Forces Of The World.

She Is Older Than The Rocks Among Which She Sits; Like The Vampire, She Has Been Dead Many Times, And Learned The Secrets Of The Grave; And Has Been A Diver In Deep Seas, And Keeps Their Fallen Day About Her; And Trafficked For Strange Webs With Eastern Merchants, And, As Leda, Was The Mother Of Helen Of Troy, And, As Saint Anne, The Mother Of Mary; And All This Has Been To Her But As The Sound Of Lyres And Flutes, And Lives Only In The Delicacy With Which It Has Molded The Changing Lineaments, And Tinged The Eyelids And The Hands.