If There Is Magic On This Planet,

Some Degree Of Withdrawal Serves To Nurture Man's Creative Powers. The Artist And The Scientist Bring Out Of The Dark Void, Like The Mysterious Universe Itself, The Unique, The Strange, The Unexpected. Numerous Observers Have Testified Upon The Loneliness Of The Process.

To Have Dragons One Must Have Change; That Is The First Principle Of Dragon Lore.

It Is Frequently The Tragedy Of The Great Artist, As It Is Of The Great Scientist, That He Frightens The Ordinary Man.

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.

As For Men, Those Myriad Little Detached Ponds With Their Own Swarming Corpuscular Life, What Were They But A Way That Water Has Of Going About Beyond The Reach Of Rivers?