Not The Fruit Of Experience,

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.

To Higher Or Lower Ends, They [the Majority Of Mankind] Move Too Often With Something Of A Sad Countenance, With Hurried And Ignoble Gait, Becoming, Unconsciously, Something Like Thorns, In Their Anxiety To Bear Grapes; It Being Possible For People, In The Pursuit Of Even Great Ends, To Become Themselves Thin And Impoverished In Spirit And Temper, Thus Diminishing The Sum Of Perfection In The World, At Its Very Sources.

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.

Such Discussions Help Us Very Little To Enjoy What Has Been Well Done In Art Or Poetry, To Discriminate Between What Is More And What Is Less Excellent In Them, Or To Use Words Like Beauty, Excellence, Art, Poetry, With A More Precise Meaning Than They Would Otherwise Have.

A Certain Strangeness, Something Of The Blossoming Of The Aloe, Is Indeed An Element In All True Works Of Art: That They Shall Excite Or Surprise Us Is Indispensable.