Books on Books #2

The forces which mould the thought of men change, or men’s resistance to them slackens; with the change of men’s thought comes a change of literature, alike in its inmost essence and its outward form: after the world has starved its soul long enough in the contemplation and the rearrangement of material things, comes the turn of the soul; and with it comes the literature of which I write this volume, a literature in which the visible is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream.

Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)