“The Angel of the Cathedral, the Angel of Illinois, said: ‘These are they who shall live invisibly by every hearth and table throughout the Capital.’
“There burst from the pavement smoke and dust and stones, and from there arose the great glass image of the cocaine Buddha. Immobile as any other stone, he was yet carried by invisible hands. He and his company rushed with a great whistling like the hissing of serpents. They went out through the walls into the streets as though the walls were nothing. They had many kinds of monsters with them, and strangely singing birds of paradise, and lions with poison quills.
“The Angel of Illinois said to me: ‘This glass image will turn to dust.’ Yet for every angel at a hearth of the city there will be a demon, a quilled lion, and a singing bird of paradise. These will eat invisibly at your tables and hearths, feeding upon the words and thoughts of the household. They will breathe hell’s breath into the faces of the children. But the Angel Soldiers of Heaven who have marched from out the High Altar will be with the people also.
“These powers will be in perpetual truce and perpetual war in every house in the Capital. But open war between nations and races of men will soon be ended forever.
“These lions have crept and ramped through the dark valleys of Heaven and they have the seeds of sweet flowers clinging to their feet and these singing birds of paradise have flown through the dark trees of heaven, and have the seeds of rare trees clinging to their pinions.
“These censers that have swung over the raw capital, will swing over many another this day, and the angel soldiers will appear in many another city around the world, and by many a far off hearthstone and family and tribal table, with their demon foes beside them, in perpetual truce, and perpetual war.”
May 15:—The premature, precocious buds and green twigs of the year are surviving this perilous spring. There are showers and carpets of every kind of blossom. It seems more like June fifteenth than May fifteenth. Beautiful people, mothers and children, boys and girls, in the lightest and whitest of summer masquerading costumes are walking and dancing over the whitest, cleanest streets our city has ever known. But the Lady Avanel and I confess to one another, as of old, that these days are not the millennium, however gay they seem to be.
And yet my lady, this evening, becomes a thing not quite of this earth, a spirit, yet a sower in earthly fields.
I whisper: “Lady Avanel, Miss Fantastic, while the star chimes are ringing another new tune, what are you sowing from your close-woven willow basket so full of seed?” The lady speaks with the voice of the wind:—“I am sowing the torturing thistle of dreams. Some men do not see this city as it is, because they have walked in easy and stupid ways. They have never walked, as we do this evening, while the Thistle of Dreams comes up. We see it springing from the ground in an instant. It will go in an hour. But if we touch it we are blessed and tormented forever by newer and newer dreams. And at last our eyes will see this city as it is, a weed patch indeed, but of fancies. And more than a weed patch of fancies,—a forest, but of gigantic dreams.
“The men who can see the dreams build the patterns into visible forms, and then we have the Sunset Towers, and the Truth Tower, and the Street of Past History, and the rest.