When I make a portrait,I cannot limit it tothe lines of the head, for that head belongs toa body, it exists ina setting which influences it, it is part of a totality that I cannot suppress. The impression you produce upon me is not thesame if I catchsight of youalone ina gardenor if Isee you in the midst of a group of other people, in a living room or on the street.

-Rosso, Medardo
Quoted in Edmond Claris De l'impressionisme en sculpture, 'Medardo Rosso' (1902).

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his wayattended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

-Wordsworth,William
c.1802^1803  'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza 5 (published1807).