art combining the mechanical and decorative in one; and oratory, perhaps the highest form of genuine prose, illustrates this fact with the greatest clearness.
Such confusions and oversights as are involved in the misapprehension which has just been exposed, might be prevented if we grouped the whole series of arts as mechanical and fine, and subdivided fine arts into decorative and esemplastic, recognising that in architecture we have the nodal point of ascending transition from the decorative to the creative.
As I reach the end of this over-prolonged inquiry,
in its unavoidable hardness and dryness so little
akin to the fair attraction of its theme, there float
into my memory, as a poetic pointing of our search’s
moral, these lines of Emerson’s, from his fragment
called The Test: —
- I hung my verses in the wind, —
- Time and tide their faults should find!
- All were winnowed through and through:
- Five lines lasted sound and true!
- Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
- Nor time unmake what Poets know.
- Have you eyes to find the five
- Which five hundred did survive?
