And The Fifteenth Century Was An Impassioned

What Is Important, Then, Is Not That The Critic Should Possess A Correct Abstract Definition Of Beauty For The Intellect, But A Certain Kind Of Temperament, The Power Of Being Deeply Moved By The Presence Of Beautiful Objects.

Beauty, Like All Other Qualities Presented To Human Experience, Is Relative; And The Definition Of It Becomes Unmeaning And Useless In Proportion To Its Abstractness. To Define Beauty Not In The Most Abstract, But In The Most Concrete Terms Possible, Not To Find A Universal Formula For It, But The Formula Which Expresses Most Adequately This Or That Special Manifestation Of It, Is The Aim Of The True Student Of Aesthetics.

To Burn Always With This Hard, Gemlike Flame, To Maintain This Ecstasy, Is Success In Life. ... While All Melts Under Our Feet, We May Well Grasp At Any Exquisite Passion, Or Any Contribution To Knowledge That Seems By A Lifted Horizon To Set The Spirit Free For A Moment, Or Any Stirring Of The Senses, Strange Dyes, Strange Colours, And Curious Odours, Or Work Of The Artist's Hands, Or The Face Of One's Friend.

That Sense Of A Life In Natural Objects, Which In Most Poetry Is But A Rhetorical Artifice, Was, Then, In Wordsworth The Assertion Of What Was For Him Almost Literal Fact.

To Regard All Things And Principles Of Things As Inconstant Modes Or Fashions Has More And More Become The Tendency Of Modern Thought.