Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.

Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word "eldritch" so many times now that I think about it.