...there is a very natural explanation of this frightful felicity, either of phrase or action, which so many men have exhibited on so many scaffolds or battlefields. It is merely that when a man has found something which he prefers to life, he then for the first time begins to live. A promptitude of poetry opens in his soul of which our paltry experiences do not possess the key. When once he has despised the world as a mere instrument, it becomes a musical instrument; it falls into certain artistic harmonies around him.
-"The Heroic that Happened" (an article from the Daily News in 1909)
Collected in Lunacy and Letters (1958)
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