Algernon Blackwood

“ This closeness to Nature was today so rare as to be almost unrecognized as possible. Its possession constituted its owner what the doctor called a "Cosmic Being"--a being scarcely differentiated from the life of the Earth Spirit herself--a direct expression of her life, a survival of a time before such expressions had separated away from her and become individualized as human creatures. Moreover, certain of these earliest manifestations or projections of her consciousness, knowing in their huge shapes of fearful yet simple beauty a glory of her own being, still also survived. ”

“ The latter in particular held him to a normal humanity; his atmosphere breathed the wholesome thickness of the majority of humankind--ordinary, egoistic, with the simplicity of the uninspiring sort. The merchant acted upon him as a sedative, and that day the Irishman took him in large doses, allopathically, for his talk formed an admirable antidote to the stress of that other burning excitement that, according to Stahl, threatened to disintegrate his personality. ”

“ The smoking-room then, with its occupants so greedy for the things that money connotes--the furs, champagne, cigars, and heavy possessions that were symbols of the personal aggrandizement they sought and valued--seemed to the Irishman like a charnel-house where those about to die sat making inventories in blind pride of the things they must leave behind. ”

“ That the Earth, as a living, conscious Being, had known visible projections of her consciousness similar to those projections of our own personality which the advanced psychologists of today now envisage as possible ”

“ For it was clear to him that with the approach to Greece, a change began to come over his companions. It was noticeable chiefly in the father. The joy that filled the man, too fine and large to be named excitement, passed from him in radiations that positively seemed to carry with them a physical extension. This, of course, was purely a clairvoyant effect upon the mind--O'Malley's divining faculty visualized the spiritual traits of the man's dilating Self. But, nevertheless, the truth remained that--somehow he increased. He grew; became interiorly more active, alive, potent ”

“ Then, weary of them all and their minute personal interests, he left the smoking-room and joined the boy again, running absurd races with him from stern to bow, playing hide-and-seek among the decks, even playing shuffle-board together. They sweated in the blazing sun and watched the dance of the sea ”