newspapers, or in any comic or tragic prints, or in the patterns of woven stuffs or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or to put upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts honest shapes or which creates unearthly beings or places or contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt.  Of the human form especially, it is so great it must never be made ridiculous.  Of ornaments to a work nothing outre can be allowed ... but those ornaments can be allowed that conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the nature of the work and come irrepressibly from it and are necessary to the completion of the work.  Most works are most beautiful without ornament ...  Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology.  Clean and vigorous children are jetted and conceived only in those communities where the models of natural forms are public every day ...  Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances.  As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor.  Then folks echo a new cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains:  How beautiful is candor!  All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.  Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world and that there is no single exception, and that never since our earth gathered itself in a mass have deceit or subterfuge or prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a shade—­and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and despised ... and that the soul has never once been fooled and never can be fooled ... and thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a foetid puff ... and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe nor upon any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any part of ethereal space, nor in the midst of density, nor under the fluid wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes, nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that condition that follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of abeyance or action afterward of vitality, nor in any process of formation or reformation anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.

Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs ... these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth out of his mother’s womb