pleasantly astonished

The art to astonish in a pleasant manner, to make a subject strange and yet familiar and attractive, this is romantic poetry.

—Novalis

Quoted in the The Brahms Notebooks* (Pendragon Press, 2003) translated by Agnes Eisenberger

*originally Jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein by Johannes Brahms, edited and introduced by Carl Krebs

remotest discoveries

The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any on which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us...

—William Wordsworth, preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads