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Think of this as reality, Lenore a sad and incomprehensible truth in 1917. All in me that is spiritual, reasonable, all that was once hopeful, revolts at this actuality and its meaning. But there is another side, that dark one, which revels in anticipation. It is the cave-man in me, hiding by night, waiting with a bludgeon to slay. I am beginning to be struck by the gradual change in my comrades.

Henry must have won that midnight duel with the Master of Ballantrae, though the latter was the better swordsman. These incidents conform to truths we recognize. And not only in the fiction that clings close to actuality do we feel a sense of truth. We feel it just as keenly in fairy tales like those of Hans Christian Andersen, or in the worthiest wonder-legends of an earlier age.

If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at times particularly in The Three Black Pennys given it an exaggerated patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell of the past and has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and emotions" to his own purposes.

And recurrence brought no mitigation, no familiarising that could temper the acute horror it inspired. To what pitch of actuality might it attain? To what lengths might it drive him? He dragged his thoughts up sharply. To dwell on it was fatal, that way lay insanity. He set his teeth and forced himself to think of other things. There was ample material.

Flaubert elects to place her in a certain provincial town, full of odd characters; he gives the town and its folk an extraordinary actuality; it is not a town quelconque, not a generalized town, but as individual and recognizable as he can make it.

Wells with which Mr. Wells is most concerned, and the world as related to him. The personality of Mr. Bennett is kept in the background. He is an interested observer, and he gives what he has seen or believes that he has seen he reports faithfully as one who might be held responsible for the actuality of his vision.

They balance between head and heart at top speed in a sort of electric and eternal see-saw. It is this perpetual quick change which gives them, it seems to me, their special grip on actuality; they never fly into the cloud-regions of theories and dreams; their heads have not time before their hearts have intervened, their hearts not time before their heads cry: "Hold!"

I suppose the demon of actuality is answerable for the wasted columns, and the demon of habit for my yearly wanderings over deserts of cocoa-nut matting, under tropical skylights, in continual torment from glaring oil-paintings.

At the supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotion expresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which was characteristic of him, and with passionate intensity. "This bread is my body." "This wine is my blood." "I give myself for you." The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when his ardent faith met full the stern actuality.

The political campaigns, except that later contest which decided the eventual fate of chattel slavery, were, in actuality, sham battles. Never were the masses so enthusiastic since the campaign of 1800 when Jefferson was elected, as they were in 1832 when they sided with President Jackson in his fight against the United States Bank.