_You_ need beauty--you need verse and color and music--you need all the
escapes--all the doors wide open--and this seemingly impertinent letter
is merely the appeal of one human creature to another, for the sake of
all the human creatures whom you have it in your power to endow with
chains or with wings.

Very sincerely yours,
BRUCE PORTER.

MY DEAR BRUCE PORTER,--

My present impatient attitude towards a mystic being without doubt has
been influenced by some impression of my childhood, but not the
terror-bringing creatures you suggest. My family was one of the last
three which clung to a dying church in my country town. I, though a boy
of twelve, passed the plate for two years while the minister's daughter
sang a solo. Our village was not a happy one, and the incongruity of our
emotional prayers and ecstasies of imagery, and the drifting dullness
and meanness of the life outside, filtered in some way into my boy mind.
I saw that suffering was real and pressing, and so many suffered
resignedly; and that imagery and my companionship with a God (I was
highly "religious" then) worked in a self-centred circle. I never
strayed from the deadly taint of some gentle form of egotism. I was then
truly in a "vault." I did things for a system of ethics, not because of
a fine rush of social brotherly intuition. My imagination was ever
concerned with me and my prospects, my salvation. I honestly and soberly
believe that your "high window of the imagination" works out in our
world as such a force for egotism; it is a self-captivating thing, it
divorces man from the plain and bitter realities of life, it brings an
anti-social emancipation to him. I can sincerely make this terrible