ear
the song of the Faun in the fountain.

For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in
our hearts.

And his heart, I knew, would be for ever empty and silent, like a temple
that has been burned with fire, and left standing, pitiful and terrible,
in mockery of a lost religion, and of a forsaken god.

* * *

Men and women, losing the thing they love, lose much, but the artist
loses far more; for him are slaughtered all the children of his dreams,
and from him are driven all the fair companions of his solitude.

* * *

Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time,
the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day
and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human
love--and art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he
looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.

* * *

And, indeed, there are always the poor: the vast throngs born century
after century, only to know the pangs of life and of death, and nothing
more. Methinks that human life is, after all, but like a human body,
with a fair and smiling face, but all the limbs ulcered and cramped and
racked with pain. No surgery of statecraft has ever known how to keep
the fair head erect, yet give the trunk and the limbs health.

* * *

For in a great love there is a self-sustaining strength by which it
lives, deprived of everything, as there are plants that live upon our
barren ruins burned by the sun, and parched and shelterless, yet ever
lifting green leaves to the light.

* * *

And indeed after all there is nothing more cruel than the impotence of
genius to hold and keep those commonest joys and mere natural affections
which dullards and worse than dullards rejoice in at their pleasure; the
common human things, whose loss makes the great possessions of its
imperial powers all valueless and vain as harps unstrung, or as lutes
that are broken.

* * *

"This world of our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no
longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute--it has an acute and
almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a
false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism.
We have escaped both the gem-