Algernon Blackwood

“ Because the word was really inadequate, describing but partially a form and outline symbolical of far more,--a measure of Nature and Deity alike.
And so, as a man dreading the entrance to a great adventure that he yet desires, the Irishman waited there alone beneath the cloud of night.... Soft threads of star-gold, trailing the sea, wove with the darkness a veil that hid from his eyes the world of crude effects. All memory of the casual realities of modern life that so distressed his soul, fled far away. ”

“ Escaping from everybody, at length, he made his way into the bows; there, covered by the stars, he waited. And the thing he waited for--he felt it coming over him with a kind of massive sensation as little local as heat or cold--was that disentanglement of a part of his personality from the rest against which Stahl had warned him. ”

“ The archetypal world, soul of the Earth, swam close about him, enormous and utterly simple. He seemed alone in some hollow of the night which Time had overlooked, and where the powers of sea and air held him in the stretch of their gigantic, changeless hands. In this hollow lay the entrance to the channel down which he presently might flash back to that primal Garden of the Earth's first beauty--her Golden Age... down which, at any rate, the authoritative Call he awaited was to come.... "Oh! what a power has white simplicity!" ”