Enslaved by second-hand ideas, Society, the old housewife has nothing new but her current needs; she prattles about her enlightenment; she has no understanding of the divine ignorance of the mind, that poetry of the soul which she would exchange for sorry and incomplete knowledge, admitting only the poetry of the eyes, hidden yet visible beneath the apparent futility of things. Should this frightful movement of modern thought continue, we shall hardly have, in a few years, a scrap of land where imagination can set its foot to rest and dream, as the heron does on one leg.

— J. Barbey D’Aurevilly