Reading (1990)
“Ah me! the vision has vanished,
The music has died away!”
Cleopatra (1858).
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William Wetmore Story 5
American sculptor, art critic, poet, translator and editor 1819–1895Related quotes

(27th April 1822) The Poet
4th May 1822) Sappho see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822
1940s, The Question – What is your Hope' (c. 1940s)

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 19. How, Though the Sphere Showed Me Other Mysteries of Spaceland, I Still Desired More; and What Came of It
Context: p>Those who have thus appeared — no one knows whence — and have returned — no one knows whither — have they also contracted their sections and vanished somehow into that more Spacious Space, whither I now entreat you to conduct me?SPHERE (MOODILY). They have vanished, certainly — if they ever appeared. But most people say that these visions arose from the thought — you will not understand me — from the brain; from the perturbed angularity of the Seer.I. Say they so? Oh, believe them not. Or if it indeed be so, that this other Space is really Thoughtland, then take me to that blessed Region where I in Thought shall see the insides of all solid things. There, before my ravished eye, a Cube, moving in some altogether new direction, but strictly according to Analogy, so as to make every particle of his interior pass through a new kind of Space, with a wake of its own — shall create a still more perfect perfection than himself, with sixteen terminal Extra-solid angles, and Eight solid Cubes for his Perimeter. And once there, shall we stay our upward course? In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein? Ah, no! Let us rather resolve that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent. Then, yielding to our intellectual onset, the gates of the Sixth Dimension shall fly open; after that a Seventh, and then an Eighth —How long I should have continued I know not. In vain did the Sphere, in his voice of thunder, reiterate his command of silence, and threaten me with the direst penalties if I persisted. Nothing could stem the flood of my ecstatic aspirations. Perhaps I was to blame; but indeed I was intoxicated with the recent draughts of Truth to which he himself had introduced me. However, the end was not long in coming. My words were cut short by a crash outside, and a simultaneous crash inside me, which impelled me through space with a velocity that precluded speech. Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom. One glimpse, one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness — which was now to become my Universe again — spread out before my eye. Then a darkness. Then a final, all-consummating thunder-peal; and, when I came to myself, I was once more a common creeping Square, in my Study at home, listening to the Peace-Cry of my approaching Wife.</p

“My music cannot possibly have given you one hundredth part of the joy your music has given me.”
Edward Elgar, in a letter to German (1924)

All Night Long.
Song lyrics, Can't Slow Down (1983)

“Music has been a shaping force… music has been there to guide the development of human nature.”
The World in Six Songs (2008)

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)

“Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!”
Starement of 3 August 1867, as quoted in An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 115

“Whoever has visions should go to the doctor.”
from Schmidt confirmed in a letter from the 26. February 2009 to the Student Council Social Sciences St.-Ursula-Gymnasium Attendorn http://sowi.st-ursula-attendorn.de/tp/tpsmid01.htm.