t of keeping the creators of ugliness at a distance!

Let us at least be honest. The world is a grim game, and we need
sometimes the very courage of Lucifer to hold our enemies back.
But in the chaos of it all, and the madness and frenzy, let us
at least hold fast to that noble daughter of the gods men name
_Imagination._ With that to aid us, we can console ourselves for
many losses, for many defeats. For the life of the Imagination flows
deep and swift, and in its flowing it can bear us to undreamed-of
coasts, where the children of fantasy and the children of irony dance
on--heedless of theory and argument.

The world is deep, as Zarathustra says, and deep is pain; and deeper
than pain is joy. I do not think that they have reached the final clue,
even with their talk of "experience" and "struggle" and the "storming
of the heights." Sometimes it is not from "experience," but from
beyond experience, that the rumour comes. Sometimes it is not from
the "struggle," but from the "rest" after the struggle, that the whisper
is given. Sometimes the voice comes to us, not from the "heights,"
but from the depths.

The truth seems to be that if the clue is to be caught at all, it will be
caught where we least expect it; and, for the catching of it, what we
have to do is not to let our theories, our principles, our convictions,
our opinions, impede our vision--but now and then to lay them aside;
but whether with them or without them, to be _prepared_--for the
Spirit bloweth where it listeth and we cannot tell whence it cometh,
or whither it goeth!

ERRATA

For Edgar Allen Poe read Edgar Allan Poe.

Page 33, line 1, for "and goose-girls. These are the things" read "and
goose-girls--these are the things."

Page 33, line 19, for "Penetre" read "Peut-etre."

Page 50, line 10, for "iron" read "urn."

Page 59, line 16, for "De Vinci" read "Da Vinci."

Page 129, line 8, for "Berwick" read "Bewick."

Page 138, line 25, for "Cabbalistic" read "Cabalistic."

Page 268/269, line 30, and line 1, for "dim-gulf," etc, read "That
dim-gulf o'er which The spirit lies, mute, motionless, aghast--how
well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those days," etc.

Page 270, line 20, for Celebralist read Cerebralist.

Page 285, line 12, for "long-drawn" read "far-drawn."

End of Project Gutenberg's Visions and Revisions, by John Cowper Powys

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