History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.
Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.
People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.
Because I know that time is always time and place is always place and only place. And what is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place. I rejoice that things are as they are.
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.