listened I thought I saw an arena.

In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the
torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be
fought out the principal battles of a later age.

* * * * *

Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, have been imagined
by men wiser than ourselves to have some power over the world--a power
which we might vanquish in a special manner, but still a power. To such
conceptions the best races of Europe cling; upon such a soil are grown
the legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet enormous, human
fate. These intermediate spirits have been called in all the older
creeds "the gods." It is in the nature of the Church to frown upon these
dreams; but I, as I listened to him, saw clearly that plain wherein the
gods had marked out an arena for mankind.

It was oval, as should be a theatre for any show, with heights around it
insignificant, but offering a vantage ground whence could be watched the
struggle in the midst. There was a sacred centre--an island and a
mount--and, within the lines, so great a concourse of gladiatorial souls
as befits the greatest of spectacles. I say, I do not know how far such
visions are permitted, nor how far the right reason of the Church
condemns them; but the dream returned to me very powerfully, recalling
my boyhood, when the traveller told me his story. I also therefore went
and caught the fresh gale of the stream of the Seine in flood, and saw
the many roofs of Paris quite clear after the rain, and read the
writings of the men I mixed with and heard the noise of the city.

* * * * *

It is not upon the paltry level of negations or of decent philosophies,
it is in the action and hot mood of creative certitudes that the French
battle is engaged. The little sophists are dumb and terrified, their
books are quite forgotten. I myself forgot (in those few days by that
water and in that city) the thin and ineffectual bodies of ignorant men
who live quite beyond any knowledge of such fires. The printed things
which tired and poor writers put down for pay no longer even disturbed
me; the reflections, the mere phantasms of reality, with which in a
secluded measure we please our intellect, faded. I was like a man who
was in the centre of two lines that meet in war; to such a man this
fellow's prose on fighting and that one's verse, this theory of
str