The Dramatic Imagination...

There is a gleam and a moving of rich stuffs and shapess and above all a countenance-is it a mask?- topped buy high jeweled headdress and bent down ever and again to catch the lights from below. We have a sense of a thing all golden, a guilded galleon riding on the waves. Golden, carved, overlaid, crusted with gold on dark gold, so heavy it can move only with a gliding step, a slow, measured approach. The billowing folds of the stiff brocaded Oriental silks make a whispering sound like the sound of waves breaking on the shore. There is a ripping of light and a soft rustling and a foam of lace on the purfled sleeves and sheen of gems over all, a mirage sapphires and moonstones and aquamarines and drops of crystal. Great triple ruffs float upon the air, veils -"slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn"- droop and fall with the stately dippings and fillings and careenings over the smooth floor of the sea. We see it for an instant, plain and clear.

Now it has vanished.

We Saw It.

And now we must make it.

-The Dramatic Imagination by Robert Edmond Jones