Algernon Blackwood

“ By the so-called Love of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material gain--to that 'unrest which men miscall delight,'--primitive children of her potent youth ... ”

“ Every element has its own living denizens. Ether, then, also has hers--the globes. 'The ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her denizens--higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the slightest pull of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us. ”

“ The night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly--the stream of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a state where they sought to lose themselves--to forget the pressure of the bars that held them--to escape the fret and worry of their harassing personalities, and touch some fringe of happiness! ”

“ The Earth is no such cripple; why should she who already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs analogous to ours? What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? ”

“ I never realized before that the mere size of our old planet could have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea of her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on which it rode ”

“ For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality and riot the inner thought.... ”

“ When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.'"
"Go on," I exclaimed, realizing that he was obviously quoting verbatim fragments from James that he had since pondered over till they had become his own, "Tell me more. It is delightful and very splendid."
"Yes," he said, "I'll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one thing: and that is--to understand that Fechner does not regard the Earth as a sort of big human being. ”

“ Every fragment of visible Nature might, as far as is known, serve as part in some organism unlike our bodies.... As to that which can, and that which cannot, play the part of an organism, we know very little. ”

“ His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized crossroads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective. ”

“ Patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact a philosopher in the 'great' sense."
"Yes," said O'Malley softly in my ear as we leaned against the chimneys and watched the tobacco curl up to the stars, "and it was this man's imagination that had evidently caught old Stahl and bowled him over. ”