"Similar, I meant, in being direct presentations to sense."
"But are there any such Goods?"
"I think so," I said. "What do you say to works of Art? These, are they not, are direct presentations to sense? Yet such that it is their whole nature and essence on the one hand to be beautiful, and to that extent Good—for I suppose you will admit that the Beautiful is a kind of Good; and on the other hand, if I may dare to say so, to be, in a certain sense, eternal."
"Eternal!" cried Ellis, "I only wish they were! What wouldn't we give for the works of Polygnotus and Apelles!"
"Oh yes," I said, "of course, in that way, regarded as material objects, they are as perishable as all the works of nature. But I was talking of them as Art, not as mere things; and from that point of view, surely, each is a moment, or a series of moments, cut away, as it were, from the contact of chance or change and set apart in a timeless world of its own, never of its own nature, to pass into something else, but only through the alien nature of the matter to which it is bound."
"What do you mean?" cried Parry. "I am quite at sea."
"Perhaps," I said, "you will understand the point better if I give it you in the words of a poet."
And I quoted the well-known stanzas from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn":
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;