"On this summit oaks had grown, queer stunted-looking trees with twisted and contorted trunks, and writhing branches; and these now stood out black against the lighted sky. And then the air changed once more; the flush increased, and a spot like blood appeared in the pond by the gate, and all the clouds were touched with fiery spots and dapples of flame; here and there it looked as if awful furnace doors were being opened." (The Hill of Dreams)
Sydney Long: Pan
"So I went on and on till I came to the secret wood which must not be described, and I crept into it by the way I had found." ('The White People')
...the jar marked Faunus...
"They drank their wine and caressed all day in the tavern. The women threw their round white arms about their lovers' necks, they intoxicated them with the scent of their hair, the priests muttered their fantastic jargon of Theurgy. And through the sonorous clash of voices there always seemed the ring of the cry: "Look for the jar marked Faunus; you will be glad."
(The Hill of Dreams)
Simeon Solomon: Habeat
"And so," the lady continued, "I spared nothing to catch him in the glistening nets of love; taking only sour and contemptuous glances in return. And at last in an incredible shape I won the victory, and then, having gained a green crown, fighting in agony against his green and crude immaturity, I devoted him to the theatre, where he amused the people by the splendour of his death." (The Hill of Dreams)
Title Page: The Three Impostors
"But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric shock: what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting the wild places and barren hills..." (The Three Impostors)
Gustave Doré: Night scene, London Docklands
"There was darkness round about him, but it flamed with hissing jets of light and naphtha fires, and great glittering lamps swayed very slowly in a violent blast of air. A horrible music, and the exultation of discordant voices, swelled in his ears, and he saw an uncertain tossing crowd of dusky figures that circled and leapt before him. There was a noise like the chant of the lost, and then there appeared in the midst of the orgy, beneath a red flame, the figure of a woman. (The Hill of Dreams)
Arthur Machen in about 1901
"I didn't buy a map; that would have spoilt it, somehow; to see everything plotted out, and named and measured. What I wanted was to feel that I was going where nobody had been before." ('A Fragment of Life')
detail from C.R.W.Nevinson: Piccadilly
"London... the city of the unending, murmuring streets"
The Hill of Dreams: 1960s paperback edition
"He was oppressed by the grim conceit that he himself still slept within the matted thicket, imprisoned by the green bastions of the Roman fort. He had never come out, but a changeling had gone down the hill, and now stirred about the earth..." (The Hill of Dreams)
.
Machen in his Fleet Street Years
"woe is ever in store for them upon whom hath fallen the eye of a lettered man" (The Chronicle of Clemendy)
The Bowmen cover, 1915
"It seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit." (1915 Introduction to 'The Bowmen')
'60s paperback: Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchards, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things - yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet - I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes" (The Great God Pan).
Gustave Doré: Over London by Rail
The little patches called gardens were mostly untilled, uncared for, squares of slimy moss, dotted with clumps of coarse ugly grass, but here and there were the blackened and rotting remains of sunflowers and marigolds. And beyond, he knew, stretched the labyrinth of streets more or less squalid, but all grey and dull, and behind were the mud pits and the steaming heaps of yellowish bricks, and to the north was a great wide cold waste, treeless, desolate, swept by bitter wind. (The Hill of Dreams)
...a place of no character...
"As I glanced up I had looked straight towards the last house in the row before me, and in an upper window of that house I had seen for some short fraction of a second a face. It was the face of a woman, and yet it was not human." ("The Inmost Light")
"All London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss." (The Hill of Dreams)
Karl Wilhelm Kolbe: Tree with Giant Vegetation
"And then and there I came upon the young man who had lost his way, and had lost - as he said - the one who lived in the white house on the hill. And I am not going to tell you about her, or her house, or her enchanted gardens. But I am sure that the young man was lost also - and for ever." ('N')
"est enim magnum chaos"
