SCULPTURE SEASONS
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read.
Whittier—Miriam.
SCULPTURE
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes
The more the statue grows.
Michael Angelo—Sonnet. Mrs. Henry
Roscoe's trans.
2
Ex quovis ligno non fit Mercurius.
A Mercury is not made out of any block of
wood.
Quoted by Appuleius as a saying of Pythagoras.
A sculptor wields
The chisel, and the stricken marble grows
To beauty.
Bryant—The Flood of Years.
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
Emerson—The Problem.
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.
Emerson—Society and Solitude. Art.
Ex pede Herculem.
From the feet, Hercules.
Herodotus. Bk. IV. Sec. LXXXII Plutarch. As quoted by Aulus Gellius. I.
1. Diogenes. V. 15.
Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature,
That fashions all her works in high relief,
And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth,
Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire;
Men, women, and all animals that breathe
Are statues, and not paintings.
| author = Longfellow
| work = Michael Angelo. Pt. III. 5.
Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater
To raise the dead to life than to create
Phantoms that seem to live.
| author = Longfellow
| work = Michael Angelo. Pt. III. 5.
And the cold marble leapt to life a God.
H. H. Milman—The Belvedere ApoUo.
The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair
Across the tide to see her image there:
Then looking up and round the prospect wide,
When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.
Plato. In Greek Anthology.
Then marble, soften'd into life, grew warm.
| author = Pope
| work = Second Book of Horace. Ep. I. L. 146.
The sculptor does not work for the anatomist,
but for the common observer of life and nature.
Ruskin—True and Beautiful. Sculpture.
So stands the statue that enchants the world,
So bending tries to veil the matchless boast,
The mingled beauties of exulting Greece.
Thomson—The Seasons. Summer. L. 1,346.
u
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
Wordsworth—The Prelude. Bk. III.
SEA BIRD
How joyously the young sea-mew
Lay dreaming on the waters blue,
Whereon our little bark had thrown
A little shade, the only one;
But shadows ever man pursue.
E. B. Browning—TheSea-Mew.
Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.
Bryant—To a Water Fowl.
Up and down! Up and down!
From the base of the wave to the billow's crown ;
And amidst the flashing and feathery foam
The Stormy Petrel finds a home,—
A home, if such a place may be,
For her who lives on the wide, wide sea,
On the craggy ice, in the frozen air,
And only seeketh her rocky lair
To warm her young and to teach them spring
At once o'er the waves on their stormy wing!
Barry Cornwall—The Stormy Petrel.
Between two seas the sea-bird's wing makes halt,
Wind-weary; while with lifting head he waits
For breath to reinspire him from the gates
That open still toward sunrise on the vault
High-domed of morning.
Swinburne—Songs of the Spring Tides. Introductory lines to Birthday Ode to Victor
Hugo.
SEASONS (Unclassified)
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sunthaw; whether the eve-drops
fall,
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles.
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
Coleridge—Frost at Midnight.
Our seasons have no fixed returns.
Without our will they come and go;
At noon our sudden summer burns,
Ere sunset all is snow.
| author = Lowell
| work = To .
Autumn to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into fall,—
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.
D. M. Mulock—Immutable.
