We Need Some Imaginative Stimulus, Some Not

Art Comes To You Proposing Frankly To Give Nothing But The Highest Quality To Your Moments As They Pass.

Experience, Already Reduced To A Group Of Impressions, Is Ringed Round For Each One Of Us By That Thick Wall Of Personality Through Which No Real Voice Has Ever Pierced On Its Way To Us, Or From Us To That Which We Can Only Conjecture To Be Without.

Great Passions May Give Us A Quickened Sense Of Life, Ecstasy And Sorrow Of Love, The Various Forms Of Enthusiastic Activity, Disinterested Or Otherwise, Which Comes Naturally To Many Of Us.

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.

And The Fifteenth Century Was An Impassioned Age, So Ardent And Serious In Its Pursuit Of Art That It Consecrated Everything With Which Art Had To Ad As A Religious Object.