but insanity must not be allowed to play with sanity. Let such
poets as the one I was reading in the garden, by all means, be free
to imagine what outrageous deities and violent landscapes they like.
By all means let them wander freely amid their opium pinnacles
and perspectives. But these huge gods, these high cities, are toys;
they must never for an instant be allowed to be anything else.
Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh,
with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream
of the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it.
By all means let him take up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can
take it lightly. But the old gods must be his dolls, not his idols.
His central sanctities, his true possessions, should be Christian
and simple. And just as a child would cherish most a wooden horse
or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the great child,
must cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety;
that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross
of wood that redeemed and conquered the world.

In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorous
remark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood by the
beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that was heaven,
what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sober truth
there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse.
It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more
universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused.
Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex
and more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude
of eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much.
But I like them beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes
wandering in deserts and finds a throne for himself that evil