nation
and the foreign tongue.

480

When we say of a landscape that it has a romantic character, it is the
secret feeling of the sublime taking the form of the past, or, what is
the same thing, of solitude, absence, or seclusion.

481

The Beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which,
without its presence, would never have been revealed.

482

It is said: Artist, study nature! But it is no trifle to develop the
noble out of the commonplace, or beauty out of uniformity.

483

When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an
irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

484

For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone
we are always debtors.

485

There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and no surer way
of uniting with it than by Art.

486

Even in the moments of highest happiness and deepest misery we need the
Artist.

487

False tendencies of the senses are a kind of desire after realism,
always better than that false tendency which expresses itself as
idealistic longing.

488

The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in
Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and
intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses.

489

It is only by Art, and especially by Poetry, that the imagination is
regulated. Nothing is more frightful than imagination without taste.

490

If we were to despise Art on the ground that it is an imitation of
Nature, it might be answered that Nature also imitates much else;
further, that Art does not exactly imitate that which can be seen by the
eyes, but goes back to that element of reason of which Nature consists
and according to which Nature acts.

491

Further, the Arts also produce much out of themselves, and, on the other
hand, add much where Nature fails in perfection, in that they possess
beauty in themselves. So it was that Pheidias could sculpture a god
although he had nothing that could be seen by the eye to imitate, but
grasped the appearance which Zeus himself would have if he were to come
before our eyes.

492

Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably
in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with
Religion.

493

A noble philosopher spoke of architecture as _frozen music_; and it was
inevitable that many people should shake their heads over h