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A Checked Love Affair, and "the Cortelyou Feud,"
A Checked Love Affair and the Cortelyou Feud Author:Paul Leicester Ford Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ART OF FOLLY III A SONG OF FOLLY THE quenchless quest of all the troubled years Is for the clean expression Fame in- spheres. Men seek life's pa... more »inful secret to disclose In forms that fit their fleeting joys and woes: In Word, and Stone, in Colour, and in Song — The paths of thought to object, that prolong A little space the records of their part — The paths that parallel, and men call art. The pictures of the Past are dead and dim, The chiselled marbles shattered, torn and grim ; The colour that the Grecians gave to men Lives only in the record of the pen; The golden word alone can mock at Time In changeless beauty as the cycles chime. The New translates the Old: forms fade and fail; But Art abides to tell again the tale In form as fair, and fitted to the need That larger thought and broader methods breed. For ever fashioning, for ever new, Her moods are many, tho' her paths are few. Great art achieves the beauty of repose, That clear content the Milo Venus knows; That restful ness the Elgin Marbles share, Serene and ample as the morning air. All art pictorial is, in sober sooth, Naught but illusion based upon the truth; And thus the truth of art, for which men sigh, Is, after all is said, truth of the lie. Pictorial art has unity of aim, Its aim is pleasure, with no rival claim; Its unit is the picture that portrays A single point of view, a focussed phase. In paint, as words, selection turns the scale, The master shuns, the tyro seeks, detail. In works of art observe what men omit, Rigid rejection is the rule of wit. The picture falls within the centred sight And types the unity that woos delight. In that one vision, clarified and true, A failure to conform would wreck the view And mark the broken and the static thought T...« less