“We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone”

— Margaret Fuller

A higher charm than modern culture won,
With all the wealth of metaphysic lore,
Gifted to analyze, dissect explore.
Life Without and Life Within (1859), Flaxman

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Margaret Fuller 116

American feminist, poet, author, and activist 1810–1850

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“To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit, which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

Source: The Greek Way (1930), Ch. 1

“Visions are from the imaginative mind, sculpture can come from the found discards in nature, from sticks and stones and parts and pieces, assembled or monolithic, solid form, open form, lines of form, or, like a painting, the illusion of form. And sculpture can be painting and painting can be sculpture..”

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“Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 2
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

“And where is now that palace gone,
All the magical skill'd stone,
All the dreaming towers wrought
By Love as if no more than thought
The unresisting marble was?
How could such a wonder pass?”

Lascelles Abercrombie (1881–1938) Poet, academic, literary critic

Emblems of Love (1912)
Context: And where is now that palace gone,
All the magical skill'd stone,
All the dreaming towers wrought
By Love as if no more than thought
The unresisting marble was?
How could such a wonder pass?
Ah, it was but built in vain
Against the stupid horns of Rome,
That pusht down into the common loam
The loveliness that shone in Spain.
But we have raised it up again!
A loftier palace, fairer far,
Is ours, and one that fears no war.
Safe in marvellous walls we are;
Wondering sense like builded fires,
High amazement of desires,
Delight and certainty of love,
Closing around, roofing above
Our unapproacht and perfect hour
Within the splendours of love's power.

“The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity,
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew,
The conscious stone to beauty grew.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

St. 2
1840s, Poems (1847), The Problem http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/problem.htm

“Hence, we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Allegedly said regarding a Greek victory over Italian invaders, but without a documented source.
Disputed

“I have always felt that one of the secrets of real beauty is simplicity.”

Rita Hayworth (1918–1987) American actress, dancer and director

Article written as guest columnist for Arlene Dahl, headlined "Rita Hayworth Sees Simplicity As Part Of Beauty" in The Toledo Blade (11 March 1964) http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19640311&id=AP1OAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WAEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7406,218312

“Simplicity is the loving inclination of the soul elevated by God, Who efficaciously drawn it into His own heart. There He reduces all its faculties to unity of spirit, that it may live there, in a n abstract, simple and essential condition, without sensible desire to reason or think of order or disorder. It is continually lost in the eternity of God.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From, Light on Carmel: An Anthology from the Works of Brother John of Saint Samson, O.Carm.

“The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to William Hunter (11 March 1790)
1790s

“I feel an inner relationship which leads from the antique tot the Gothic, especially from the early ancient art, and from the Gothic to my own feeling for form. A great simplicity of form is something marvelous. As far back as I can remember, I have tried to put the simplicity of nature into the heads that I was painting or drawing. Now I have a real sense of being able to learn from the heads of ancient sculpture..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, 1899; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 198
1899

“We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,And in the forms of gods and heroes wroughtEternal beauty from the sculptured stone”

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Margaret Fuller 116

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“We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone”