Arthur Symons citations

“He knew that the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd, and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness is not a necessary virtue.”

“The gipsy tents are on the down,
The gipsy girls are here;
And it's O to be off and away from the town
With a gipsy for my dear!”

“The gray-green stretch of sandy grass,
Indefinitely desolate;
A sea of lead, a sky of slate;
Already autumn in the air, alas!
One stark monotony of stone,
The long hotel, acutely white,
Against the after-sunset light
Withers gray-green, and takes the grass's tone.”

“The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world.”

“And I would have, now love is over,
An end to all, an end:
I cannot, having been your lover,
Stoop to become your friend!”

“I have loved colours, and not flowers;
Their motion, not the swallows wings;
And wasted more than half my hours
Without the comradeship of things.”

“What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves…. He must have the passion of a lover.”

“My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.”

“I heard the sighing of the reeds
At noontide and at evening,
And some old dream I had forgotten
I seemed to be remembering.”

“They weave a slow andante as in sleep,
Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white;
With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keep
A treachery of silence; infinite.”

“Sweet, can I sing you the song of your kisses?
How soft is this one, how subtle this is,
How fluttering swift as a bird's kiss that is,
As a bird that taps at a leafy lattice;
How this one clings and how that uncloses
From bud to flower in the way of roses.”

“The wind is rising on the sea,
The windy white foam-dancers leap;
And the sea moans uneasily,
And turns to sleep, and cannot sleep.”

“Here in a little lonely room
I am master of earth and sea,
And the planets come to me.”

“I have laid sorrow to sleep;
Love sleeps.
She who oft made me weep
Now weeps.”

“My life is like a music-hall,
Where, in the impotence of rage,
Chained by enchantment to my stall,
I see myself upon the stage
Dance to amuse a music-hall.”

“They pass upon their old, tremulous feet,
Creeping with little satchels down the street,
And they remember, many years ago,
Passing that way in silks. They wander, slow
And solitary, through the city ways,
And they alone remember those old days
Men have forgotten.”

“Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.”

“All art is a form of artifice. For in art there can be no prejudices.”

“Emmy's exquisite youth and her virginal air,
Eyes and teeth in the flash of a musical smile,
Come to me out of the past, and I see her there
As I saw her once for a while.”

“Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders.”