Word: mood
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...time of the disastrous expedition of Athens against Sicily. There are three views of the purpose with which Aristophanes wrote "The Birds." The first of these is that the play was intended to be a travesty on the Sicilian expedition. This explanation is not likely because the mood of the Athenians on Sicilian affairs was anything but humorous. The second view is that "The Birds" was written to bring about a great reform; but Aristophanes has given no proof that this was his intention. The third view is that the play is purely a fanciful creation, which is really...
...would commend these books, but the languages as ladders to them, where by we may climb to a larger outlook over men and things, to a retreat lifted above the noises of the world. It is not the scholarship I look at, but the sympathy with their higher mood, with that sweetness that comes with age to good books as to good men. Mere scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old postage stamps. Kant used to say that there was nothing in the world so dreary as the company of mere scholars. With nothing but Lemprire's Dictionary...
...beauty that made the Greeks themselves Greek. The advice of Cato, cum bonis ambula, holds as good of books as of men. If the mind, like the dyer's hand, becomes insensibly subdued to what it works in, so also may it steep itself in a noble and victorious mood, may sweeten itself with a refinement that feels a vulgar thought like a stain, and store up sunshine against darker days. It is the books which heighten and clarify the character, whose seciety I would bid you seek. I think they tend to keep us pure. They disinfect the imagination...
Even as a teacher he is often too much of a pedagogue, and is apt to forget that poetry instructs not by precept and inculcation, but by hints and indirections and suggestions, by inducing a mood rather than by enforcing a principle or a moral. He sometimes impresses our fancy with the image of a schoolmaster whose class-room commands an unrivalled prospect of cloud and mountain, of all the pomp and prodigality of heaven and earth. From time to time he calls his pupils to the window, and makes them see what, without the finer intuition of his eyes...
Unfortunately, Gorgona died young. His work, however, though inferior to that of Titian, perhaps influenced the latter. Calm in mood, dignified in conception, Titian is the embodiment of excellence in painting. He made no attempt to express the inexpressible, but was rather the portrayer of humanity. For ninety-nine years he lived in full possession of his powers, combining a perfect mastery of his art with a wide knowledge of nature. It is generally not permissible to call an artist the best there has been, but if anyone deserves the superlative, it is Titian...