in good order the forces destined to serve them, and to create
open spaces within us; nor can the time thus employed be possibly
wasted.

5

These thoughts have arisen within me through my having been compelled,
a few days ago, to glance through two or three little dramas of mine,
wherein lies revealed the disquiet of a mind that has given itself
wholly to mystery; a disquiet legitimate enough in itself, perhaps, but
not so inevitable as to warrant its own complacency. The keynote of
these little plays is dread of the unknown that surrounds us. I, or
rather some obscure poetical feeling within me (for with the sincerest
of poets a division must often be made between the instinctive feeling
of their art and the thoughts of their real life), seemed to believe in
a species of monstrous, invisible, fatal power that gave heed to our
every action, and was hostile to our smile, to our life, to our peace
and our love. Its intentions could not be divined, but the spirit of
the drama assumed them to be malevolent always. In its essence,
perhaps, this power was just, but only in anger; and it exercised
justice in a manner so crooked, so secret, so sluggish and remote, that
its punishments--for it never rewarded--took the semblance of
inexplicable, arbitrary acts of fate. We had there, in a word, more or
less the idea of the God of the Christian blent with that of ancient
fatality, lurking in nature's impenetrable twilight, whence it eagerly
watched, contested, and saddened the projects, the feelings, the
thoughts and the happiness of man.

6

This unknown would most frequently appear in the shape of death. The
presence of death--infinite, menacing, for ever treacherously
active--filled every interstice of the poem. The problem of existence
was answered only by the enigma of annihilation. And it was a callous,
inexorable death; blind, and groping its mysterious way with only
chance to guide it; laying its hands preferentially on the youngest and
the least unhappy, since these held themselves less motionless than
others, and that every too sudden movement in the night arrested its
attention. And around it were only poor little trembling, elementary
creatures, who shivered for an instant and wept, on the brink of a
gulf; and their words and their tears had importance only from the fact
that each word they spoke and each tear they shed fell into this gulf,
and were at times so strangely resonant there as to lead one