And lived through every kind of change.
I know when men are bad or good,
When well or ill," he slowly said,
"When sad or glad, when sane or mad
And when they sleep alive or dead."
[Footnote: _In the Room_]

Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious
memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not
come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript
product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is
on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror
across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a
person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would
seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow
imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing
higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport."
[Footnote: _Republic_ X, 599 A.]

It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake
their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd
enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of
dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel
the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow
assigns to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude:

Painting and sculpture are but images;
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,