The Analyst: A Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, Natural History, and the Fine Arts, Volume 3

Front Cover
Edward Mammatt
Simpkin and Marshall, 1836

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 179 - The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Page 179 - Lovers, and madmen, have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold ; That is, the madman : the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt...
Page 102 - O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe'er, But falls into abatement and low price, Even in a minute; so full of shapes is fancy, That it alone is high fantastical.
Page 195 - I do embrace it : for even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer ; there is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers : it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear, as the whole world, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony, which intellectually...
Page 250 - But, as when the sun approaching toward the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills...
Page 195 - If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die.— That strain again;— it had a dying fall; O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour.— Enough; no more; 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
Page 179 - We cannot indeed have a single image in the fancy that did not make its first entrance through the sight; but we have the power of retaining, altering, and compounding those images which we have once received into all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination...
Page 250 - ... and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still while a man tells the story the sun gets up higher...
Page 255 - For in many cases, all that we can do, or should aim at, is to make the best of what Nature has given; to prevent the Vices and Faults to which such a Constitution is most inclined, and give it all the Advantages it is capable of. Every one's Natural Genius should be carried as far as it could, but to Attempt the putting another upon him, will be but Labour in vain...
Page 195 - The mistake of most people is, to suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and therefore that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not so; it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices of the ear (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed ; and therefore it is that people of equally good ear differ so much in this point from one another.

Bibliographic information