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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: angel of sportive fancy,--epics, works of art, and visions rise along
the way. It is a nature, an essence, mocking yet kind, fruitful though
destitute. Thus, for the enthusiastic Poussin, the old man became by
sudden transfiguration Art itself,--art with all its secrets, its
transports, and its dreams.
"Yes, my dear Porbus," said Frenhofer, speaking half in reverie, "I
have never yet beheld a perfect woman; a body whose outlines were
faultless and whose flesh-tints--Ah! where lives she?" he cried,
interrupting his own words; "where lives the lost Venus of the
ancients, so long sought for, whose scattered beauty we snatch by
glimpses? Oh! to see for a moment, a single moment, the divine
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