imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he
meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of
Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of
the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing
away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the
world and could not find them; and under the power of all those
countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies
in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the
power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won
everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and
fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many
think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them
again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in
soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay
in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking
humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.'

He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my
waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had
begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicably
silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in
the world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us,' the voice
began again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you
have met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the
thunder-storm, and he laughs because you thought yourself an
existence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternal
god; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as
though all the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and
there is the mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spell
over men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might