19th-century Critic Quotes

Ezra Pound

John Ruskin

Matthew Arnold

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Georg Brandes

Sergei Diaghilev

Vissarion Belinsky

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore.

It makes the plant neither more nor less interesting that it smells sweet or stings; but the dispassionate interest of the botanist is often accompanied by the purely human pleasure in the beauty of the flower.

A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!

Henry Fothergill Chorley

What Nature has writ with her lusty wit Is worded so wisely and kindly That whoever has dipped in her manuscript Must up and follow her blindly.

William Ernest Henley

Morn on the waters, and purple and bright Bursts on the billows the flushing of light O'er the glad waves, like a child of the sun, See the tall vessel goes gallantly on.

Thomas Kibble Hervey

On me, on me
Time and change can heap no more!
The painful past with blighting grief
Hath left my heart a withered leaf.
Time and change can do no more.

Richard Henry Horne

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

A good sonnet appears to be a confession-in a word either patently artificial, and then it is bad, or good, then it sounds like autobiography.

George Lyman Kittredge

I dwell no more in Arcady, But when the sky is blue with May, And birds are blithe and winds are free, I know what message is for me, For I have been in Arcady.

Louise Chandler Moulton

Let the children play
And sit like flowers upon thy grave
And crown with flowers,—that hardly have
A briefer blooming-tide than they.

Francis Turner Palgrave

Only the heel
Of splendid steel
Shall stand secure on sliding fate,
When golden navies weep their freight.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.

Hullo! What's this? What are these funny brown-and-olive landscapes doing in an impressionist exhibition? Brown! I ask you? Isn't it absurd for a man to go on using brown and call himself an impressionist painter?

If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

George Saintsbury

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.

John Campbell Shairp

Straight is the way to Acheron,
Whether the spirit's race is run
From Athens or from Meroe:
Weep not, far from home to die;
The wind doth blow in every sky
That wafts us to that doleful sea.

John Addington Symonds

A sonnet is a wave of melody
From heaving waters of the impassion'd soul.

Theodore Watts-Dunton