
Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man - Part XX
Letter XXIV
ACCORDINGLY three different moments or stages of development can be distinguished, which the individual man, as well as the whole race, must of necessity traverse in a determinate order if they are to fulfil the circle of their determination. No doubt, the separate periods can be lengthened or shortened, through accidental causes which are inherent either in the influence of external things or under the free caprice of men; but neither of them can be overstepped

A Defence of Poetry - Part X
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed th

Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man - Part VII
Letter XI If abstraction rises to as great an elevation as possible, it arrives at two primary ideas, before which it is obliged to stop and to recognise its limits. It distinguishes in man something that continues, and something that changes incessantly. That which continues it names his person; that which changes his position, his condition. The person and the condition, I and my determinations, which we represent as one and the same thing in the necessary being, are eterna

Beauty & Truth
Part Four: Time and Eternity
X I DIED for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? “For beauty,” I replied. “And I for truth,—the two are one; We brethren are,” he said. And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names. Emily Dickinson, without doubt, earned her title as one of the Masters of Literature.