"For from the highest and most spiritual standpoint it is worth while to go many days in the desert, if by that desolation one may win the god-like pleasure of being surprised at a man."

Literature at its best, then, is essentially a liberation of types, persons, and things; a permission to them to be themselves in safety and to the glory of God. It offers a fuller consideration of a man's case than the world can give him; it offers, to all, noble possibilities of fuller growth than is practicable upon earth; it offers to the meanest soul whom it studies the divine emptiness of an uncreated world. It gives a man what he often longs for more than houses or gardens—deserts. For from the highest and most spiritual standpoint it is worth while to go many days in the desert, if by that desolation one may win the god-like pleasure of being surprised at a man. It is in this setting of a thing in freedom, and ringing it with sanctity, it is in this snatching it out of the tedium of law and the inevitable, that literature is nearest to faith and divine things.

-The Independent Review, Volume 5, February-April 1905