There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, an...d the remains of the earliest Greek art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to... see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a ...distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,--nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »