The world's history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.

Alas! When duty grows thy law, enjoyment fades away.

It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.

It is easy to give advice from a port of safety.

Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance.

Sorrows must die with the joys they outnumber.

The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.