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All this luxury—William waved a slender hand at the damask hangings and rococo furniture—is no less an instrument of the spirit than the whip which the monk hangs on the wall of his cell and takes down nightly to purify his soul!
Ecstasy does not only make, as the Cavaliere might say, an unreasonable demand on life. It has to turn brutal, too.
To really love something is to wish to die of it. Or to live only in it, which is the same thing. To go up and never have to come down.
nor is it likely that anyone else will either, for it appears there are no more than ten or fifteen works of art in the whole world that create obsessions (this recent estimate, probably low, by the Superintendent of Fine Arts in Florence, whose city has the honor to harbor two of these, Michelangelo’s statue and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus). The Portland Vase is not on the list.
The other daughter was herself, whereas this child bore the hero’s first name, with the feminine a ending. So this tiny babe was her only child.
And one will never convince the ignorant that they are ignorant, nor fools that they are fools.
Talking with him was like talking with someone on a horse.
It seems unchristian of me to reproach him for not being what he could not be.
