It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience but there was a difference. I had already been waist-deep in Romanticism and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. “It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought - almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions - the Everyman edition of Phantastes.
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