truly
believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by
writing badly. Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright and
straight; around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils
may crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative
literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and
the straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if
he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that
they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained
to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the
brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you
look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made.

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she
whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will
catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike
tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly
with us over the moon, like that wild amorous cow whose child was the
Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up
nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will answer the
call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall
not ride on me.

The Telegraph Poles

My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood which
make inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe; which have
the true terror of a desert, since they are uniform, and so one may lose
one's way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar, stood up all around
us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There is a
truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature often
shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in
this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a
single shape until the shape shall turn terrible.

Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as
"dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like
"snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by
repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable
as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.

It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be for
this reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles. P