temples, their cruel and colossal faces.

"Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued
the Hebrews and was splashed
With wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had green
beryls for her eyes?"

I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News; still
it was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere,
a fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed really to come from the
Bondage of Egypt or the Burden of Tyre There is not much in common
(thank God) between my garden with the grey-green English sky-line
beyond it, and these mad visions of painted palaces huge, headless
idols and monstrous solitudes of red or golden sand. Nevertheless (as
I confessed to myself) I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some such
smell of death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one of
their ruined temples: a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black
flapping thing detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and flutters
to another. I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy it
was a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings
of a bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and the
wings of a bat. I think, if there were light enough, I could sit here
and write some very creditable creepy tale, about how I went up the
crooked road beyond the church and met Something--say a dog, a dog with
one eye. Then I should meet a horse, perhaps, a horse without a rider,
the horse also would have one eye. Then the inhuman silence would be
broken; I should meet a man (need I say, a one-eyed man?) who would ask
me the way to my own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to the
ground. I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such lines. Or I
might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees above me. They are
so tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests of the
angels; but in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels; angels
of death.

Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do not believe in it in the
least. That one-eyed universe, with its one-eyed men and beasts, was
only created with one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I
should not find the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest;
the dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shall
discover that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the
Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare--when you
kn