Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay on Art.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its separate and contrasted existence

Art makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass onto enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from use, the laws of nature do not permit. (...) The art that thus separates itself is thus separated

Every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world.

Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belong to our great mechanical works -to mills, railways, and machinery- the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey. When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature (...) When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought...(...) It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fullness to the object, the thought, the word they alight upon, and to make that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach and to magnify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object, -so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,- the painter and sculptor exhibit in colour and stone. The power depends on the depth of the artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour, and concentrates attention on itself.

What is man but nature's finer success in self-explication?.. and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of nature but a still finer success?