Ennobling

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

The poet’s business is not with facts as such, or with inferences, but with truth of feeling, and the very spirit of truth. His function is ideal; that is, from the prosaic, the individual, the limited, he is to lift us up to the universal, the generic, the boundless. In compassing this noble end he may, if such be his bent, use the facts and feelings and individualities of daily life; and, by illuminating and ennobling them he will approve his human insight, as well as his poetic gift.

If the poet has employed a life in battling with pernicious prejudices, in setting aside narrow views, in enlightening the minds, purifying the tastes, ennobling the feelings and thoughts of his countrymen, what better could he have done?

Some of the learned, devoting themselves entirely to criticism, chronology, or philology, remain absolute strangers to the more ennobling sciences.

He checks criticism by multiplying the cause for embarrassment and taking it on himself; and this brings the act into the structure of an ennobling chivalric deed.

It is not a very ennobling voice, the voice of Worldly Prudence; but it is, perhaps, none the less practically influential on that account.

They may think to improve the Scripture; but by their ennoblings they debase it, by their enrichings they impoverish it, by their enlargings they contract it.