motionless, tense, quivering, wrestling in an agony with the powers of
destruction. It is so real to me that my body stiffens into stone, and I
sit with the sweat on my forehead. That happened to me to-day, and I wrote
a few lines of the poem that made my voice break--the passionate despairing
cry for deliverance, for rest from the terror.

But there is no rest. The mountain slope is so that there is no standing
upon it, and once you stop, it breaks your heart to begin again. And so you
go on--up--up--and there is not any summit.

It is that way when you write a book; and that way when you make a
symphony; and that way when you wage a war.

* * * * *

But my soul hungered for it. I have loved the great elemental
art-works--the art-works that were born of pure suffering. For months
before I began The Captive I read but three books--read them and brooded
over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus
Unbound, and Samson Agonistes.

You sit with these books, and time and space "to nothingness do sink."
There looms up before you--like a bare mountain in its majesty--the great
elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance.
You may build yourself any philosophy or any creed you please, but you
will never get away from the world-fact--the death-grapple of the soul
with circumstance. Aschylus has one creed, and Milton has another,
and Shelley has a third; but always it is the death-grapple. Chaos,
evil--circumstance--lies about you, binds you; and you grip it--you close
with it--all your days you toil with it, you shape it into systems, you