You have read "Epipsychidion," my dear
Dean? And, in your time, no doubt you have loved? {15} Well,
this is the Isle of Love, described, as in a dream, by the rapt
fancy of Shelley. Urged, perhaps, by a reminiscence of the Great
Aryan wave of migration, I have moved westward to this Paradise.
Like Obermann, I hide my head "from the wild tempest of the age,"
but in a much dearer place than "chalets near the Alpine snow."
Long ago I said, to one who would not listen, that "all the
religions of the world are based on false foundations, resting on
the Family, and fatally unsound." Here the Family, in our sense,
has not been developed. Here no rules trammel the best and
therefore the most evanescent of our affections. And as for
Religion, it is based upon Me, on Rondelet of Lothian. Here nobody
asks me why or how I am "superior." The artless natives at once
perceived the fact, recognised me as a god, and worship me (do not
shudder, my good Dean) with floral services. In Te-a-Iti (vain to
look for it on the map!) I have found my place--a place far from
the babel of your brutal politics, a place where I am addressed in
liquid accents of adoration.
You may ask whether I endeavour to raise the islanders to my own
level? It is the last thing that I would attempt. Culture they do
not need: their dainty hieratic precisions of ritual are a
sufficient culture in themselves.
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