Algernon Blackwood

“ Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between God and us, obeying His commands. So, if the heavens really are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there are none. Yes! the Earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.'
"And then," whispered the Irishman, seeing that I still eagerly listened, "give your ear to one of his moments of direct vision. ”

“ Think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain tops. ”

“ Life became very wonderful inside those tight, confining walls, for the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the heart. Even if belief failed, in the sense of believing--a shilling, it succeeded in the sense of believing--a symphony. ”

“ Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her all at once--all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. ”

“ Here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions fan the will. The little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy, nor deaden effort. ”

“ And the others were not so very far behind--those other little parcels of Earth's Consciousness the Greeks and early races, the simple, primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and labeled "gods" ... and worshipped ... so as to draw their powers into themselves by ecstasy and vision ... ”

“ She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. ”