Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the window in the landscape it displays. A fine style gives the view of fancy--its figures, its trees, or its palaces,--without a spot. — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
One interesting feature of criticism is seen in the ease with which it discovers what Addison called the specific quality of an author. In Livy, it will be the manner of telling the story; in Sallust, personal identification with the… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
Poetical taste is the only magician whose wand is not broken. No hand, except its own, can dissolve the fabric of beauty in which… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
Some gifted adventurer is always sailing round the world of art and science, to bring home costly merchandise from every port. — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
Taste is not stationary. It grows every day, and is improved by cultivation, as a good temper is refined by religion. In its most… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is like a harbor, into which a far-traveling curiosity has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor.… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
Romance is the truth of imagination and boyhood. Homer's horses clear the world at a bound. The child's eye needs no horizon to its… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
The advice of a scholar, whose piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is never to be forgotten. Proportion an hour's reflection… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its… — Robert Aris Willmott Copy Share Image
