"It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time."
"The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience."
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Source: Henry James (2015). “The Portrait of a Lady (Unabridged): From the famous author of the realism movement, known for The Turn of The Screw, The Wings of the Dove, The American, The Bostonian, The Ambassadors, What Maisie Knew…”, p.154, e-artnow
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