So then--not quite out of rash hilarity,--does the creating writer intoxicate himself with such self-brewed imaginings as he finds most effective: so does he flout perforce the opinions of his fellow citizens, the while that he creates a more approvable race in his own image: and so does he dismiss, half negligently, the material cosmos as rather bungling prentice work, in very little exemplifying the rules which he himself prefers as demiurge. As Hecuba to Hamlet, so to him is the knowledge that such creatures as "realists" are everywhere truckling to nature in their tenth large editions, and go enfranchised in these books to patch up a mimic existence in every respect as undesirable as their own.... For the creating romanticist quite simply declines to accept either the human conduct of life upon earth or any assumable theocratic overseeing of it from heaven as a competent performance. Men and whatever gods may potter about in charge of men this myopic weakling unaffectedly esteems to be not at all up to his standards. Yet, none the less, somewhere from afar may be watching him--as, here again, seems whispered by irrational instinct,--a power which exacts, without any pliable descent into logic, that its material handiwork be approached with the civil condonations of piety.... That power may well be the second of Them. And by this ruthless but unangered power perhaps the babbling runagate must always be punished, in one way or another, for his disloyalties to his fellows and to his native overlords. Such was the feeling, I believe, which fidgeted in the bottom of the minds of my replete, romantic oldsters,--the both of them well-nigh used up, it might be, but both unsmashed, and both unrepentantly aware of not having been, in common with the most of their contemporaries, wasted,--as they drowsed among their finished books. For, whatever happened, that many of their books were finished.... § 57