... The pain of utter isolation—somehow this means Romance to me, in a deeper fold of being. Isolation—the hate of an undivided people—a man standing alone against his nation, yet loving it better than any of the natives.... I remember in an early story of having the hero do his big task under the fiery stimulus of the hate of London. All this has something to do with the coming of Saviours.
Time approaches for many when the little three score and ten fails longer to hold the full story; one must look out of this sickly warm room of the body; one longs for the mystic death, which is martyrdom.... I tell all this from time to time in tales—but only the children seem to understand....
Romance—I have walked up and down streets and open highways for days and found no man's work challenging, nothing to keep alive my interest. I wanted absolutely nothing that any one else in the world had, nothing that any one could gain. All worldly activities looked diminished and pathetic to me—but under it all—the endless iteration of the Soul: "Here is a man—as much me as myself!" A call in that—always a call in that. One longs to die for that, once and for all.
I crossed the Yellow Sea with a wound long ago. I had missed a battle and was suffering, without the satisfaction of suffering with a bullet wound.... I lay three deep in Chinese coolies in deck passage. I wanted to see some one at home, or I should have dropped overside. In the fag of pain, on the border of delirium, I lay with the deep down men of the world, Chinese coolies in their filth and vomit. I looked into the eyes of the nearest, and saw a brother, not a stranger.... It was ten years afterward before I caught the big meaning of that moment—and that's why I say so often that the time comes when we find the sons of God in the eyes of passing men. That is Romance.
There is more of death and less of days in my dream of Romance now.... I can see a man giving up his woman because she is dearer than his own life to him. I can see a man going to the scaffold for a country that is taking his life and hers. (Always I see him loving his country more dearly than the sober ones of regnancy and war.) ... I see him taking his woman in his hands—half laughing, half crying, their faces upturned—one creature in that moment of parting, as they had never been in street or church, or state.... Romance in that.
I have a line here from the Valley Road Girl:
... Lastly, it came like a commandment to me—to give all to the Coming Generation—to acknowledge the New Race as one's God—remembering always that all Gods are jealous Gods."
It's all in that, our dream of Romance—Democracy, the Planetary Hive.