THE MIND'S EYE
An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense] that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey—what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty objectively? The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of his senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere.
A LAND OF BLISS
The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups—and the eagle level with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below.
TIME AND ETERNITY
The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a baro major, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder—while, even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the simul et totum as the antitheton of time.