For Although Nepenthe Has Calmed Me, I

Mid-summer ... When The Alchemy Of Nature Transmutes The Sylvan Landscape To One Vivid And Almost Homogeneous Mass Of Green; When The Senses Are Well-nigh Intoxicated With The Surging Seas Of Moist Verdure And The Subtly Indefinable Odours Of The Soil And The Vegetation. In Such Surroundings The Mind Loses Its Perspective; Time And Space Become Trivial And Unreal, And Echoes Of A Forgotten Prehistoric Past Beat Insistently Upon The Enthralled Consciousness.

Life Is A Hideous Thing, And From The Background Behind What We Know Of It Peer Daemoniacal Hints Of Truth Which Make It Sometimes A Thousandfold More Hideous.

Religion Itself Is An Absurdity And An Anomaly, And Paganism Is Acceptable Only Because It Represents That Purely Orgiastic Phase Of Religion Farthest From Reality.

If I Am Mad, It Is Mercy! May The Gods Pity The Man Who In His Callousness Can Remain Sane To The Hideous End!

Rome Was So Mighty That It Could Not Fall. It Had To Vanish In A Cloud, Like So Many Of The Mythical Heros Of Antiquity, And To Receive Its Apotheosis Among The Stars Before Men Became Fully Aware That It Had Vanished From The Earth!