The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fiction, Classics 12+

📓 The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole indications of his wild, forest nature. Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill -- in a word, a sculptor and a poet too -- could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and then have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in marble. Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being in whom both races meet on friendly ground. The idea grows coarse as we handle it, and hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over the statue, he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of sylvan life -- And, after all, the idea may have been no dream. . . .