Quotes About Arcady

The woods of Arcady are dead,And over is their antique joy;Of old the world on dreaming fed;Gray Truth is now her painted toy.

Oh, it was fair in Arcady! Birds built and sang in every tree, And trill and warble, chirp and song, Rang sweet and clear the whole day long; The violets blossomed all the year, No lightnings scathed our happy sphere, Nor frost congealed on wood or lea, What time we dwelt in Arcady!

It was, then, in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born — that a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss. But no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is.

The famous "O bell'età de l'oro" in Torquato Tasso's Aminta (1573) is not so much a eulogy of Arcady as an invective against the constrained and conscience-ridden spirit of Tasso's own period, the age of the Counter-Reformation. Flowing hair and nude bodies are bound and concealed, deportment and carriage have lost touch with nature; the very spring of pleasure is polluted, the very gift of Love perverted into theft.

We can easily see that the new conception of the Tomb in Arcady initiated by Poussin's Louvre picture, and sanctioned by the mistranslation of its inscription, could lead to reflections of almost opposite nature, depressing and melancholy on the one hand, comforting and assuaging on the other; and more often than not, to a truly "Romantic" fusion of both.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over it their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Gray Truth is now her painted toy.