I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo--that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture--great ...in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between meals. I like a change, occasionally. In Genoa, he designed every thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo? In Florence, he painted every thing, designed every thing, nearly, and what he didn't design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed everything but the old shot-tower, and they would have attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular. He designed the piers of Leghorn and the custom house regulations of Civita Vecchia. But, here--here it is frightful. He designed St. Peter's; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope's soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima--the eternal bore designed the Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted every thing in it!... I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned t...hat Michael Angelo was dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone... Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I read The Sound and the Fury or Middlemarch, I'm filled with the aromas of either book, with past readings and relationships t...o the characters, with a whole continent of language and scenes, but the books don't frighten me. I can enter into their dream songs, and leave at my own will. But if I'm watching Casablanca on the wall, I'll let my eye slip past the phony details, the studio-bound streets, the laughable sense of a fabricated city, and drift into that dream of Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Cafe Americain, which exists outside any laws of physics, like the eternal dream of Hollywood itself, a little dopey, but with a power we can't resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In soliciting donations from his flock, a preacher may promise eternal life in a celestial city whose streets are paved with gold,... and that's none of the law's business. But if he promises an annual free stay in a luxury hotel on Earth, he'd better have the rooms available.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square;... Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »