In each, we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that
rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble
what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring
away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each
inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and
acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the
painted windows and the storied walls.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, from The Lantern-Bearers



Source: every@SDF.org