Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Washington Allston

Who can look at this exquisite little creature seated on its cushion, and not acknowledge its prerogative of life—that mysterious influence which in spite of the stubborn understanding masters the mind, sending it back to days long past, when care was but a dream, and its most serious business a childish frolic? But we no longer think of childhood as the past, still less as an abstraction; we see it embodied before us, in all its mirth, and fun, and glee, and the grave man becomes again a child, to feel as a child, and to follow the little enchanter through all its wiles and never-ending labyrinth of pranks. What can be real if that is not which so takes us out of our present selves that the weight of years falls from us as a garment; that the freshness of life seems to begin anew; and the heart and the fancy, resuming their first joyous consciousness, to launch again into this moving world, as on a sunny sea whose pliant waves yield to the touch, sparkling and buoyant, carry them onward in their merry gambols? Where all the purposes of reality are answered, if there be no philosophy in admitting, we see no wisdom in disputing it.

Some men make their ignorance the measure of excellence: these are, of course, very fastidious critics; for, knowing little, they can find but little to like.

The painter who is content with the praise of the world in respect to what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic,—for his time, and not for his art.