My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of rhythmical throbbing ... and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal...

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me.

Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death.

I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying: "Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city."

For the cat is cryptic, and close to Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content.

But he was unmoved, and cried: "If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!"

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. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species -- if separate species we be -- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.

Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.

I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness...

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed.

Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

Queer haow a cravin' gits a holt on ye -- As ye love the Almighty, young man, don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy -- here, set still, what's ailin' ye? ...

These folk say that on a table in a bare room on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a small piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite vibrations as if in answer. Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him again.

I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places.

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die."

Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? ... Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.

Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.

And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld against the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale mournful planets searching for their sister.

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep.

... for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon.

It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance.

... West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way.

Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all -- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous.

They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.

Men of learning suspect it little, and ignore it mostly.

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments -- inarticulateness.

There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness ...

We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred...

As we hastened from that abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St. John's pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure. So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.

History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism.

Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and "unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author.

We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology -- preferably those of the Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.

The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men's crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom -- we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron strait-jacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.

I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.

Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings, but something I cannot and must not recall.

"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head."

For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.

Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.

Prying curiosity means death.

They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.

I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt.

But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy.

There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.

The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned house's terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It it still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice.

More people enter Red Hook than leave it -- or at least, than leave it by the landward side -- and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.

I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision.

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.

So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before -- the unwhisperable secret of secrets -- that fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.

Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was Thomas Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary with seeing the same things for many years, and thinking the same well-disciplined thoughts.

Then Olney saw lingering against the translucent squares of each of the little dim windows in succession a queer black outline as the caller moved inquisitively about before leaving; and he was glad his host had not answered the knocking. For there are strange objects in the great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up or meet the wrong ones.

Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the table, and then bolder ones in the dark panelled corners.

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.

And they do not wish quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listless down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and wilder in that unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the sea to the skies.

All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile the morning mist still comes up by that lonely vertiginous peak with the steep ancient house, that grey low-eaved house where none is seen but where evening brings furtive lights while the north wind tells of strange revels.

And when tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapours flock to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy on its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.

The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

... another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest -- a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who held a well-known Boston guide-book and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, "Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn".

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things -- in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings, but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

What seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. ("In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.")

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die.

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.

I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side.

Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however, soon shewed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them.

Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above their own level.

There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say.

Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.

It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.

No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The Dutchman's breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion.

One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and blond, with studious eyes and a slight stoop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.

The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.

I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.

Just beyond Elder Snow's church some of the men turned back to take a parting look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars. Steeples and gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes swept up gently from the cove north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the great hill across the water, whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished College edifice. At the foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side, the old town dreamed; Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and colossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out.

Old Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long, continuous history which had brought him into being, and which had drawn him back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the case might be, for which all his years of travel and application had been preparing him.

A taxicab whirled him through Post Office Square with its glimpse of the river, the old Market House, and the head of the bay, and up the steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vast gleaming dome and sunset-flushed Ionic columns of the Christian Science Church beckoned northward. Then eight squares past the fine old estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint brick sidewalks so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white overtaken farmhouse on the right, on the left the classic Adam porch and stately facade of the great brick house where he was born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

"I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again."

That Thomas Sabin's Boston coach was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may well have told; but what healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's new signboard (the gaudy crown he set up after he took to calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the first few notes of the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?

Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream-world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it would be disastrous to say where.

There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the Zoogs do not pause near that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead, and they would not like to see the slab rise slowly and deliberately.

So, Atal said, it would be much better to let all gods alone except in tactful prayers.

A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in his conversation. It was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of the mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's cats fear; the very large and peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of the charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil toad-things, and are notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this juncture a meeting would have been a somewhat grave matter.

But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.

There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat a ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman.

For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man.

Carter was there to greet them, and the sight of shapely, wholesome cats was indeed good for his eyes after the things he had seen and walked with in the abyss.

A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.

Once a lookout reported fires on the hills to the east, but the sleepy captain said they had better not be looked at too much, since it was highly uncertain just who or what had lit them.

It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is not the reason why no cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inquanok holds shadows which no cat can endure, so that in all that cold twilight realm there is never a cheering purr or a homely mew.

Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All below was still black, but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a meaning and directiveness they had never possessed elsewhere. It was not that the figures of the constellations were different, but that the same familiar shapes now revealed a significance they had formerly failed to make plain. Everything focussed toward the north; every curve and asterism of the glittering sky became part of a vast design whose function was to hurry first the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret and terrible goal of convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead.

It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.

Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath?

As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold.

Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades.

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity -- never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.

I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed -- from hints which made even my informant pause timidly -- the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao.

The sense of a throwback was all the stronger because I felt instinctively that the common problem of the Spaniard and myself was one of such abysmal timelessness -- of such unholy and unearthly eternity -- that the scant four hundred years between us bulked as nothing in comparison. It took no more than a single look at that monstrous and insidious cylinder to make me realize the dizzying gulfs that yawned between all men of the known earth and the primal mysteries it represented. Before that gulf Pànfilo de Zamacona and I stood side by side; just as Aristotle and I, or Cheops and I, might have stood.

Never mix up with secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your immortal soul.

Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.

Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left.

Every incident of that four-and-a-half hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's laws.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.

We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region; objects including scientific instruments, aeroplanes, and machinery both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harboured singular curiosity and investigativeness.

There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name -- cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation; terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion; shafts with odd bulbous enlargements; broken columns in curious groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness.

Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.

These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms -- animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aërial -- were the products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.

Perhaps we were mad -- for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit -- albeit in a less extreme form -- in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.

Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them -- as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste - and this was their tragic homecoming.

They had not been even savages -- for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch -- perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia ... poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!

The penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so.

"South Station Under -- Washington Under -- Park Street Under-Kendall -- Central -- Harvard -- " The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it.

It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be"; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform -- the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.

The grey half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will find them still undisturbed.

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.

But he was still content, for at one mighty venture he was to learn all. Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see, even with a single eye.

He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath on mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm.

The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Imposter.

If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.

After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space -- to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.

Madness, of course -- but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I?

If the thing were there -- and if I were not dreaming -- the implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream.

If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time.

I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.

If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found.

Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth.

Likewise are there dread survivals of things older and more potent than man; things that have blasphemously straggled down through the aeons to ages never meant for them; monstrous entities that have lain sleeping endlessly in incredible crypts and remote caverns, outside the laws of reason and causation, and ready to be waked by such blasphemers as shall know their dark forbidden signs and furtive passwords.

As the end approaches I feel more kindly toward the things. In the scale of cosmic entity who can say which species stands higher, or more nearly approaches a space-wide organic norm -- theirs or mine?

Things seen by the inward sight, like those flashing visions which comes as we drift into the blankness of sleep, are more vivid and meaningful to us in that form than when we have sought to weld them with reality.

Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it.

In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them rests no yoke of line or hue.

There were painted women in tinsel adornments, and bored men who were no longer young -- a throng of foolish marionettes perched on the lip of the ocean-chasm; unseeing, unwilling to see what lay above them and about, in the multitudinous grandeur of the stars and the leagues of the night ocean.

When I reached my high residence I knew that I had passed no one during the mile's walk from the village, and yet there somehow lingered an impression that I had been all the while accompanied by the spirit of the lonely sea.

It was astonishing the number of useless things people found to do.

The morning ocean, glimmering with a reflected mist of blue-white cloud and expanding diamond foam, has the eyes of one who ponders on strange things; and her intricately woven webs, through which dart a myriad coloured fishes, hold the air of some great idle thing which will arise presently from the hoary immemorial chasms and stride upon the land.

The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse.

The ocean ruled my life during the whole of that late summer; demanding it as recompense for the healing she had brought me.

There were drownings at the beach that year; and while I heard of these only casually (such is our indifference to a death which does not concern us, and to which we are not witness), I knew that their details were unsavoury.

Frequently, in a momentary perception, we feel that a feathery landscape (for instance), a woman's dress along the curve of a road by afternoon, or the solidity of a century-defying tree against the pale morning sky (the conditions more than the object being significant) hold something precious, some golden virtue that we must grasp.

I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing.

It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life.

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present, and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

The one test of the really weird is simply this -- whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.

Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.

It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.

Round pegs find round holes, square pegs find square holes. And by the same token, albeit with rather greater difficulty, I am sure that there must somewhere be a corresponding hole for such a peg as proverbial metaphor may dub trapezohedral!

As, gazing on each comic act / I stare at your perfection, / I find it hard to face the fact / That you're a mere projection.

Frankly, I cannot conceive how any thoughtful man can really be happy. There is really nothing in the universe to live for, and unless one can dismiss thought and speculation from his mind, he is liable to be engulfed by the very immensity of creation. It is vastly better that he should amuse himself with religion, or any other convenient palliative to reality which comes to hand.

I am no great success in this world, and doubtless will not be in the next, but when it comes to a catalogue of crimes and evils I really cannot think of any worse offense than writing bad verse and not rolling my "rrr...s".

Foolish, do I hear you say? Undoubtedly! I had better be a consistent pragmatist: get drunk and confine myself to a happy, swinish, contented little world -- the gutter -- till some policeman's No. 13 boot intrudes upon my philosophic repose.

As to "Sherlock Holmes" -- I used to be infatuated with him! I read every Sherlock Holmes story published, and even organised a detective agency when I was thirteen, arrogating to myself the proud pseudonym of S.H. ...

About the word "peruse" -- possibly I do employ it to excess, but Mr Addison was ever my model of style in prose.

My mother, showing no signs of recovery, has gone to a hospital, where she is receiving the most expert care which medical science can afford. I strongly hope the change will benefit her. It has a good chance of doing so, since many features of diet & regimen which the physicians are prescribing, are directly opposite to those prescribed by the previous practitioner.

Of course, I am unfamiliar with amatory phenomena save through cursory reading.

Then I perceived with horror that I was growing too old for pleasure. Ruthless Time had set its fell claw upon me, and I was seventeen. Big boys do not play in toy houses and mock gardens, so I was obliged to turn over my world in sorrow to another and younger boy who dwelt across the lot from me. And since that time I have not delved in the earth or laid out paths and roads. There is too much wistful memory in such procedure, for the fleeting joy of childhood may never be recaptured. Adulthood is hell.

I was 23 years of age, and realised that my infirmities would withhold me from success in the world at large. Feeling like a cipher, I felt that I might well be erased.

I had a visitor the other night, who gave me an idea for a good story. He was a furry, four-footed young visitor, with a black coat, white gloves and boots, and white around the tip of his nose and the tip of his tail. He sat in a chair near me, purring most inspiringly, when I permitted my fancy to consider his ancient race and heritage.

They invited me to their meeting of March 10, which was supposed to be in honour of the not unknown Santus Patricius -- the Scotsman who drave from Hibernia all the snakes save the Sinn Fein.

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

Anything savouring of quiet and tameness is maddeningly abhorrent to me -- not in actual life, for that I wish as placid as possible; but in thought, which is my more vivid life.

I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.

What merriment I have is always derived from the satirical principle, and what sadness I have, is not so much personal, as a vast and terrible melancholy at the pain and futility of all existence in a blind and purposeless cosmos.

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect -- designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.

David V. Bush is a short, plump fellow of about forty-five, with a bland face, bald head, and very fair taste in attire. He is actually an immensely good sort -- kindly, affable, winning, and smiling. Probably he has to be in order to induce people to let him live after they have read his verse.

With becoming modesty he announces his intention of revolutionising the country with his new gospel of dynamic psychology; which has all the virtues of "New Thought" plus a saving vagueness which prevents its absurdity from being exposed before the credulous public amongst whom his missionary labours lie.

He enjoys life -- as do all who are spared the curse of intelligence.

I'm now too thoroughly cynical to expect much of amateurdom, or to give many damns about it; save as a perpetually chaotic mess from which a few odd souls can get some impetus toward literary development ... or at least toward a fairly comfortable literary disillusion.

Physical life and experience, with the narrowings of artistic vision they create in the majority, are the objects of my most profoud contempt. It is for this reason that I despise Bohemians, who think it essential to art to lead wild lives. My loathing is not from the standpoint of Puritan morality, but from that of aesthetic independence -- I revolt at the notion that physical life is of any value or significance. To me the ideal artist is a gentleman who shows his contempt for life by continuing in the quiet ways of his ancestors, leaving his fancy free to explore refulgent and amazing spheres.

Ideas are very foolish -- they mean nothing and lead nowhere. Rest, beauty, tranquility -- these only have value.

I have no opinions -- I believe in nothing -- but assume for the time whatever opinion amuses me or is opposite to that of the person or persons present.

Evening had come, and through silent, unillumined Colonial streets I made my way to the station, glancing now and then at the arabesques of the tenebrous steeples and Gothic vanes and singular chimney-pots as they stood limned before the inscrutable and immemorial stars; the pale, langurous stars that saw Portsmouth born, and that without a smile will see Portsmouth die.

I am lately inform'd that, all these weeks later, young Donald's first remark on being introduc'd to Niagara Falls, was the exclamation: "Gee, what wou'd Mr. Lovecraft say!" -- a thing which may be taken as evidence, that the youth is not unimprest with volubility and flow, whether in aqueous torrents or in childish old gentlemen.

I hated monstrously to see him go, for he is a person of the most companionable amiability, even if he does write down all his expenditures in a little green note book for his wife to see.

As to these limited editions and so forth -- I don't care for 'em at all. All I want of a book is to have it in good clear type for my old eyes, clean, and free from misprints. What edition it is, or who owned it in the past, isn't any concern of mine; although I do like it to be in the "long S" if possible.

Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.

I was only fifteen minutes late -- a degree of promptness which will through all my after life give me the sensation of being as punctual as a tradesman.

We ascended to the organ loft, and I endeavor'd to play Yes, We Have no Bananas, but was balk'd by lack of power, since the machine is not a self-starter.

I have always thought there is a peculiar fascination about provincial towns, where time treads lightly and leaves curious byways, customs, and heritages; all the more fascinating if the town be large enough to contain bewildering and labyrinthine recesses, and little worlds unknown each to the other.

Habitations of men should never be made -- they should be sown, water'd, weeded, tended, and allowed to grow by subtle processes. What makes a town really lovely and fascinating, is the quaint irregularity which links it to its geographical location -- the suggestions of hill and dale, river and shore -- and to the continuous history of its inhabitants -- the marks of original settlement, slow expansion, and development in channels and directions determin'd by the topography of the site and aspirations and genius of the people. These things are all that make a city vivid and dramatick and human -- all that give it the captivating individuality which differentiates it from any other city.

Happy indeed is that town which grew slowly enough to leave traces of the gradual evolution from year to year, and gently enough to preserve the original topographical lines of hill and shore -- the lines that are graceful because born of Nature, and that find embodiment in curved streets, quaint slopes or flights of steps, simple and dignify'd bridges, sea-walls, and embankments, quiet nooks and terraces, and all other vestiges which show man's conformity to Nature rather than man's artificial conquest of Nature by prosaic, repudiatory feats of engineering.

If these ancient spots were fascinating in the busy hours of twilight, fancy their utter and poignant charm in the sinister hours before dawn, when only cats, criminals, astronomers, and poetic antiquarians roam the waking world!

The town, brooding quietly in the Sabbath radiance despite the herds of sightseers unloos'd upon it, does not at first impress one. The Monument is so distant, the sky so vacant of tall buildings, and the ground so devoted to parks, malls, and wide spaces, that one cannot gather the sense of compact and active life which one usually associates with large cities.

During this hospital period I had my first experience in lone housekeeping. Aided by the written instructions of my wife I made coffee that I could actually drink, and cooked spaghetti that I could actually eat -- and as a matter of personal pride I kept the house swept and dusted.

Reaching the farmhouse by motor from the station, we found it quite tolerable though somewhat lonely; and to my mind vastly enhanced by the lively presence of a large family of irresistible gray kittens.

I like a tale to be told as directly and impersonally as possible, from an angle of utter and absolute detachment.

It so happens that I am unable to take pleasure or interest in anything but a mental re-creation of other & better days ... so in order to avoid the madness which leads to violence & suicide I must cling to the few shreds of old days & old ways which are left to me.

Yes -- such sensitivenesses of temperament are very inconvenient when one has no money -- but it's easier to criticise than to cure them.

As I have always said, missionaries are infernal nuisances who ought to be kept at home -- dull, solemn asses without scientific acumen or historical perspective ...

When my stuff is done it always disappoints me -- never quite presenting the fulness of the picture I have in mind -- but since a crude fixation of the image is better than nothing, I plug along & do the feeble best I can.

Peste! Sacrebleu! Nom d'un Cochon vert! O Saint Dieu et Notre Dame de Montreal! THIS GAWD-DAMN COLD!!!

Ineffective & injudicious I may be, but I trust I may never be inartistic or ill-bred in my course of conduct.

Possess, O Flambeau of Patersonic Tenebrosity, a cardiac organ; and heap upon my valueless cranium the carbonaceous symbols of Eblis' aeternal conflagrations!

Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.

Yrs. for ghouls, afreets, and undertakers--

As to Long's notion that your work systematically contains phallic symbolism -- he picked that up at second-hand from Loveman, who seems to have done enough delving in that line to see phalli in most things from church steeples to mushrooms.

It's a pretty old world, after all, & we shall never learn much about the inner nature of things...

You poets can't age -- split me, Sir, if Samuelus isn't a flaming youth still from all his barren pole and uncertain equator!

As to what is meant by "weird" -- and of course weirdness is by no means confined to horror -- I should say that the real criterion is a strong impression of the suspension of natural laws or the presence of unseen worlds or forces close at hand.

Besides the aesthetic, you have managed to work in the practical -- which is always a sealed mystery to me.

I imagine that Wandrei must be rather a young chap -- though possessed of a fund of imagery & command of language which will serve him well when he has learnt the lessons of restraint & austerity of form form which come with later life.

I can't get interested in it -- it doesn't even bore me enough to take my mind off other boredoms.

This primary attention to plot is probably a wise choice on your part, because to the weird writer plot is so much more difficult to achieve than atmosphere.

But in the end, atmosphere repays cultivation; because it is the final criterion of convincingness or unconvincingness in any tale whose major appeal is to the imagination.

And to think I read them ----- ----- proofs five ----- ----- times!

As to eyeshades and reversed caps -- you can't convince me that either or both is or are (a) worth getting indignant or critical about, or (b) any more foolish than dozens of other accepted customs.

Everything in the world outside primitive needs is the chance result of inessential causes and random associations, and there's no real or solid criterion by which one can condemn any particular manifestation of human restlessness.

In the more southerly portions the very earth sparkles with some shining powder that the fanciful would call star dust -- but which I, as a veteran mineralogist, know must come from the oxydising up of the neighbouring rocks -- which have mica or something. Being exceedingly charitable where expense is not involved, I herewith enclose a very modest specimen as a nucleus of the Theobald Collection of American Rocks, for which I shall expect a special wing to be built at the museum.

All we may say is, that the more purely an aesthete a man is, the more likely he is to prefer cats; since the superior grace, beauty, manners and neatness of the cat cannot but conquer the fancy of any impartial observer emancipated from mundane and ethical illusions.

We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded pretty, and that's all we know and all we need to know!

You can get a fairly good bird's-eye view of literary modernism by reading Ben Hecht's Erik Dorn for prose, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for what purports to be verse.

About Oscar Wilde -- it seems to me that he forms a prominent point in the history of literature without having been supremely great himself.

No -- New York is dead, & the brilliancy which so impresses one from outside is the phosphoresence of a maggoty corpse.

Sterling was a real poet, & the fact of his not fitting the age is purely the age's fault.

By this time I see pretty well what I'm driving at and how I'm doing it -- that I'm a rather one-sided person whose only really burning interests are the past and the unknown or the strange, and whose aestheticism in general is more negative than positive -- i.e., a hatred of ugliness rather than an active love of beauty.

I abhor broad prosaic highways with their implications of change, modernity, and decadence, and make for the calm, untainted inner countryside whenever I possibly can.

I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing -- a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.

It is the frank & cynical recognition of the inevitable limitations of people in general which makes me absolutely indifferent instead of actively hostile toward mankind.

If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.

The vistas I relish most are those in which the sunset plays a transfiguring & glorifying part.

Living things -- usually insane or idiotic members of the family -- concealed in the garrets or secret rooms of old houses are or at least have been literal realities in rural New England -- I was told by someone of how he stopped at a lone farmhouse on some errand years ago, and was nearly frightened out of his wits by the opening of a sliding panel in the kitchen wall, and the appearance of the most horrible, dirt-caked, and matted-bearded face he had ever conceived possible to exist!

Mere grotesqueness is very common; sly, malign madness sometimes lurks around the corner; and berserk, revolting murder under peculiarly messy and clumsy conditions is a matter of not infrequent record.

All the common, unadorned things have been thought and said and repeated a thousand times before. The dull, prosaic world of usual feelings and events is so well "written up" that nothing vital remains to be added.

And one may add, that the birth of a dear little chee-ild would not solve all problems in glib nickleodeon fashion! Rather, it would be a complication provocative of even more misery.

Chambers is like Rupert Hughes & a few other fallen Titans -- equipped with the right brains & education, but wholly out of the habit of using them.

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

Wandrei can tell you all there is to be told about the art of hitch-hiking, whereby the expense of railway fare becomes as obsolete & quaint a memory as the era of good taste in literature!

There are twenty-eight varieties this season, and we sampled them all within the course of an hour.

And now, at thirty-seven, I am gradually headed for pure antiquarianism and architecture, and away from literature altogether! Heaven knows where I'll end up -- but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.

Well, the orgy is over at last, and the Old Gentlemen is weakly gasping amidst the prodigious welter of work which piled up during his absence. Shall I ever see daylight again? Only Mana-Yood-Sushai can tell! I burrow -- I wallow -- and still there press spectrally upon me the sinister shadows of imperative agenda. Where did I mislay that cyanide? No matter, a revolver will do. But first I must get those Bullen proofs out of the way!

Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I'm no lover of humanity. To me cats are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect -- but I don't try to raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a dogmatic generality...

That is the perennial grief of an architectural antiquarian -- in a city as large as Providence or Boston something quaint is always being demolished in the interest of alleged progress...

As for your new novelette -- look here, young man, you'd better be mighty careful how you treat your aged and dignified Grandpa as here! You mustn't make me doing anything cheerful or wholesome, and remember that only the direst of damnations can befit so inveterate a daemon of the cosmick abysses.

I haven't very much energy or perseverance -- the uselessness of everything, including even aesthetic effort, overshadows my consciousness & coöperates with my native indolence in defeating all progressive or constructive developments.

As to futility & work -- I have come to the comfortably elderly condition of not caring a rap whether I do anything or not!

I didn't want the mediaeval stuff, but the book was too good to tear in half.

Sir, I refuse to fall into your adroit trap! I simply say -- with a delicate wave of a perfectly manicured and correctly gloved hand -- that you are wrong and I am right. Why? Because I say so! And that is all a gentleman can add to the matter!

In a way, crosswords do harm by cluttering up the mind with an aimless heap of unusual words selected purely for mechanical exigencies and having no well-proportioned relation to the needs of graceful discourse.

After walking for some distance, I encounter'd the rusty tracks of a street-railway, & the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp & sagging trolley wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow, vestibuled car numbered 1852 -- of a plain, double-trucked type common from 1900 to 1910. It was untenanted, but evidently ready to start; the trolley being on the wire & the air-brake pump now & then throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it & looked vainly about for the light switch -- noting as I did so the absence of controller handle which implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat down in one of the cross seats toward the middle, awaiting the arrival of the crew & the starting of the vehicle. Presently I heard a swishing in the sparse grass toward the left, & saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a railway company, & I could not doubt but that they were the conductor & motorman. Then one of them sniffed with singular sharpness, & raised his face to howl to the moon. The other dropped on all fours to run toward the car. I leaped up at once & raced madly out of that car & away across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion waked me -- doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapeding to one blood-red tentacle. ...

In furnishing my Irish colleague with an account of my vivid and active career I did not think it necessary to mention trifles so tame as Satanism and neogonophagy -- nay, nor my voyage up the Oxus, nor my visit to Samarcand, nor how and why I slew the yellow-veiled priest at Lhasa -- that priest whose yellow silken veil stood out too far in front of where his face ought to be, and moved in a manner that I did not like.

The Magnum Innominandum does not forget.

As for affectation -- I'm not fond of any kind, but hate literary affectation the worst, because it is more permanent and subversive in its essence. We can get rid of our personal affectations when we begin to see their absurdity, but our literary affectations are embalmed in cold print, and have perhaps ruined or at least vitiated what might have been our best work.

This especial old bird, according to an anecdote recorded by George Sterling, parted from Bierce under the dramatic circumstances of having a can broken over his head! When I saw his fiction I wondered why Ambrosius didn't use a crowbar.

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.

Yes -- nocturnal howling has an element of fearfulness for me. I always associate it with lean, dog-faced beings that walk sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four, and that lope abroad in the night's small hours.

As for the matter of drinking -- I have never tasted intoxicating liquor, and never intend to; having a strong aesthetic disgust at anything which blunts or coarsens the delicate natural equipoise of the evolved human intellect and imagination.

I think drink is ugly, and therefore I have nothing to do with it.

Have you read The Castle of Otranto itself? If not, don't! Let the summary in Railo continue to give you a "kick", for the original certainly won't!

Coleridge represented a fine balance betwixt mind and fancy, and I like him all the better for not having an excess of sloppy emotion. The fact that his experience came through books rather than life does not militate against him, because he had the rare faculty of accepting the contents of books in an abstract way, as if the material came directly from life with literary filtration. Bookishness becomes tepid and artificial only when one looks at the books instead of through them. So long as they are utilized only as telescopes, and not worshipped for their mechanical selves, they form very acceptable substitutes for vital experience.

Ingenuous Age once more essays to find / A proper Gift for Youth's sophistick Mind, / Well tho' he know how bootless 'tis to send / Aught that his own old Head can comprehend.

Of Wit and Beauty keeps discreetly chary, / And forfeits Sense to be contemporary.

Devoid of Pomp as Woolworth's or McCrory's, / And cerebral as Vogue or Snappy-Stories.

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

Here are we -- and yonder yawns the universe.

Speaking of boredom -- why don't you try to accumulate a library which will furnish you with a solid reserve of intellectual and aesthetic pabulum? The expense -- unless you are particular about the appearance of the books -- is truly next to nothing; for one can obtain astonishing bargains on the 10-cent and 25-cent counters of second-hand book shops.

I couldn't live a week without a private library -- indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

But the important thing to consider is the prodigious vitality of the Roman idea. 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!

I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.

I can dream a whole cycle of colonial life from merely gazing on a tattered old book or almanack with the long 'f'.

It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture -- drugged and frenzied with the hasheesh of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy.

All of my 38 1/2 years show in me, I guess; and so far as my temperament is concerned, I was born an old man.

However -- I am not quite such a solemn prig as you probably assume from my letters.

My fiction can't be compared with Poe's or Machen's, but I take no less pleasure in writing it on that account.

The masters of art are not to 'bow down before', but to enjoy rationally & with a proper appreciation.

Language, vocabulary, ideas, imagery -- everything succumbed to my one intense purpose of thinking & dreaming myself back into that world of periwigs & long s's which for some odd reason seemed to me the normal world.

Even when I break away, it is generally only through imitating something else! There are my "Poe" pieces & my "Dunsany" pieces -- but alas -- where are my Lovecraft pieces?

One thing I'll say for labour; & that is, that it isn't as offensive as the corresponding mutatory force which now threatens culture in America. I refer to the force of business as a dominating motive in life, & a persistent absorber of the strongest creative energies of the American people.

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

... an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the publick at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination...

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.

Despite my tremendous admiration for things like Dunsany's Gods of the Mountain and O'Neill's Emperor Jones, I have never as yet employed drama as a medium of expression. Probably the reason is that in the sort of work I am trying to do human characters matter very little.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.