Robert Brown Art Quotations

When earth breaks up and heaven expands,/ How will the change strike me and you / In the house not made with hands?

What's come to perfection perishes. / Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven. / Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.

Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be

She had / A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed.

It is the glory and the good of Art, / That Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth, to minds like mine at least.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: / I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

I watched my foolish heart expand / In the lazy glow of benevolence, / O'er the various modes of man's belief.

Where is the thread now? Off again! / The old trick! only I discern - / Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn.

There may be heaven; there must be hell; / Meantime, there is our earth here - well!

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, / The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, / Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; / Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.