In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.

But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed,through which the creator passes.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.

But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.

Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.