Algernon Blackwood

“ For years it was an obsession with him, haunting and wonderful--the knowledge that some one who watched close beside him, filling his mind with fairy thoughts, might any moment gaze into his face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy. ”

“ Yet Henry Rogers, who felt it, said 'puzzled' without more ado, although mind, imagination, memory all hummed and buzzed pleasantly about his ears even while he did so.
'A dream is a dream,' he reflected as he raced along the familiar dusty road in the twilight, 'and a reverie is a reverie; but that, I'd swear, went a bit further than either one or t'other. It puzzles me. Does vivid thinking, I wonder, make pictures everywhere?... ”

“ It struck me so in you as a boy, that even your sprites worked not for themselves but for others--your Dustman, your Sweep, your absurd Lamplighter, all were busy doing wonderful things to help their neighbours, all, too, without reward.'
Rogers flushed like a boy. But he felt the thrill of his dream course through him like great fires. Wherein was any single thing in the world worth doing, any object of life worth following, unless as means to an end, and that end helping some one else. ”

“ It's belief that moves the world; people want teachers --that's my experience in the pulpit and the parish; a world in miniature, after all--but they won't listen to a teacher who hasn't got it. There are no great poets to-day, only great discoverers. The poets, the interpreters of discovery, are gone--starved out of life by ridicule, and by questions to which exact answers are impossible. With your imagination and belief you might help a world far larger than this parish of mine at any rate. ”

“ And catch it when it lies asleep--not thinking of itself,' he whispered.
'The time is so short--'
'At forty you stand upon the threshold of life, with values learned and rubbish cleared away. So many by that time are already dead--in heart. I envy your opportunities ahead. You have learned already one foundation truth--the grandeur of toil and the insignificance of acquisition. The other foundation thing is even simpler--you have a neighbour. Now, with your money to give as flowers, and your Belief to steer you straight, you have the world before you. ”

“ Do you really think--?'
'I only mean,' the other replied more gravely, 'that what a man thinks, and makes with thinking, is the real thing. It's in the heart that sin is first real. The act is the least important end of it-- grave only because it is the inevitable result of the thinking. Action is merely delayed thinking, after all. ”

“ Now he took all his own childhood's sprites out in this Starlight Express and introduced them to these transplanted children who had never made acquaintance with the English breed. They had surprising, wild adventures all together, yet in the morning he could remember very little of it all. The interfering sun melted them all down in dew. The adventures had some object, however; that was clear; though what the object was, except that it did good somewhere to. some one, was gone, lost in the deeps of sleep behind him. They scurried about the world. ”

“ One's own little personal dreams became exhausted in a few years, endeavours for self smothered beneath the rain of disappointments; but others, and work for others, this was endless and inexhaustible. ”

“ It's a remarkable gift. You will never bury it, will you?' He spoke eagerly, passionately, leaning forward a little across the table. 'Few have it nowadays; it grows rarer with the luxury and self-seeking of the age. ”

“ How Joan helped you too--or was it May? I used to wonder sometimes--' he glanced up rather searchingly at his companion a moment--' whether the people who took the Manor House after your family left did not encounter them sometimes upon the lawn or among the shrubberies in the dusk--those sprites of yours. Eh?' He passed a neatly pared walnut across the table to his guest. 'These ghosts that people nowadays explain scientifically--what are they but thoughts visualised by vivid thinking such as yours was--creative thinking? ”