“Yes, but not always,” Gerald stated. “For the one way for a poet to appreciate the true loveliness of a place is not ever to go to it. No, Horvendile, a poet is not to be fobbed off with facts. No matter what the surrounding facts might be, all poets from Prometheus to Jurgen have preferred a beautiful idea to play with. So a logical poet will always destroy his appointed kingdom, because in this way only can he convert it into a beautiful idea. Therefore for me, who am a poet of sorts, to have entered into my appointed kingdom would have been woefully shiftless. I would have had henceforward only one kingdom. But, as it is, I can remake the destroyed place several times a day, in my imaginings, and can every time rebuild it more beautifully. I have thus a thousand kingdoms, each one of them more lovely than the other. To-day it will be Evasherah who awaits me there, among all the splendor and the perfume and the sunlit lewdness of the most ancient East: to-morrow the sweet singing of feathery-legged Evadne will summon me to a quite different Antan, which then will be a sea-engirdled, low-lying tropic island: but the day after that, far more idyllic lures will be recalling me to that pastel-colored, pastoral and rather populous Antan which is inhabited by all the many dreams that I had in youth, and is to be made my strictly personal heaven by the pure lips of Evarvan. Whereas, upon yet other occasions,—when my turn of mind takes on a more scholastic turn,—I shall know that in Antan awaits me each paragraph of the profound, wide erudition of Evaine.... But more often, Horvendile, I shall think of yet another woman and of a boy child, who were not wonderful in anything, but who for a while seemed mine. And I shall believe that these two wait for me, in a much more prosaic Antan; and I shall know that no magic, howsoever mightier than the less aspiring dreams of my manhood, can afford to me anything more dear.... For all that one needs, Horvendile, I have had. Antan could boast of nothing more desirable, to me, than that which I have had. So now not any power can ever quell my thankfulness for those illusions which have made sport with me for my allotted while. And I cry out defiantly, among your waiting swine, in this gray place of endless ruining, I am content...!”