THE HUMAN CHORD

BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

1910




_To those who hear._




Chapter I


I

As a boy he constructed so vividly in imagination that he came to believe
in the living reality of his creations: for everybody and everything he
found names--real names. Inside him somewhere stretched immense
playgrounds, compared to which the hay-fields and lawns of his father's
estate seemed trivial: plains without horizon, seas deep enough to float
the planets like corks, and "such tremendous forests" with "trees like
tall pointed hilltops." He had only to close his eyes, drop his thoughts
inwards, sink after them himself, call aloud and--see.

His imagination conceived and bore--worlds; but nothing in these worlds
became alive until he discovered its true and living name. The name was