swarming hives--the millions of tiny creatures, each drunk and blind with
his own selfishness; and so she lays her great hand upon it all, and hides
it out of her sight.

Once it was all silent, and formless as the desert; soon it shall all be
silent and formless again; and meanwhile--the night, the night!

* * * * *

Oh, I hunger for the desert! I do not care for beauty--I have no time for
beauty, I want the earth stern and forbidding. Give me some place where no
one else would want to go--an iron crag where the oceans beat--a
mountain-top where the lightning splinters on the rocks.

* * * * *

I go at it again. But I am nervous--these things get me into such a state
that I simply can not do anything. It was not merely yesterday--I have it
constantly. The dirty chambermaid singing, or yelling down to the landlady;
the drunken man swearing at his wife; the boys screaming in the street and
kicking a tomato-can about. When I think of how much beauty and power has
been shattered in my life by such things as these, it brings tears of
impotent rage into my eyes.

I must be free--oh, I must be free!

* * * * *

It comes strangely from the author of The Captive, does it not?