To The Modern Spirit Nothing Is, Or

A Sudden Light Transfigures A Trivial Thing, A Weather-vane, A Windmill, A Winnowing Flail, The Dust In The Barn Door; A Moment - And The Thing Has Vanished, Because It Was Pure Effect; But It Leaves A Relish Behind It, A Longing That The Accident May Happen Again.

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

It Is With A Rush Of Home-sickness That The Thought Of Death Presents Itself.... Such Sentiment Is The Eternal Stock Of All Religions, Modified Indeed By Changes Of Time And Place, But Indestructible, Because Its Root Is So Deep In The Earth Of Man's Nature. The Breath Of Religious Initiators Passes Over Them; A Few "rise Up With Wings As Eagles" [isaiah 40:31], But The Broad Level Of Religious Life Is Not Permanently Changed. Religious Progress, Like All Purely Spiritual Progress, Is Confined To A Few.

A Book, Like A Person, Has Its Fortunes With One; Is Lucky Or Unlucky In The Precise Moment Of Its Falling In Our Way, And Often By Some Happy Accident Counts With Us For Something More Than Its Independent Value.