“If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

The Rhodora
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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Do you have more details about the quote "If eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being." by Ralph Waldo Emerson?
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Ralph Waldo Emerson 727
American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

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“Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
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Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.”

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The Rhodora http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/rhodora.htm
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“It was to little purpose to excuse the matter, by saying, that the badness of the Verses was a kind of Testimony that they were made by a God, who nobly scorn'd to be tyed up to rules and to be confined to the Beauty of a Style.”

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Context: It was to little purpose to excuse the matter, by saying, that the badness of the Verses was a kind of Testimony that they were made by a God, who nobly scorn'd to be tyed up to rules and to be confined to the Beauty of a Style. For this made no impression upon the Philosophers; who, to turn this answer into ridicule, compared it to the Story of a Painter, who being hired to draw the Picture of a Horse tumbling on his Back upon the ground, drew one running full speed: and when he was told, that this was not such a Picture as was bespoke, he turned it upside down, and then ask'd if the Horse did not tumble upon his back now. Thus these Philosophers jeered such Persons, who by a way of arguing that would serve both ways, could equally prove that the Verses were made by a God, whether they were good or bad.<!--pp. 219-220

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