CAS on Robert E. Howard I thought the last issue of W.T. rather punk, apart from the verses and one or two fine passages in Howard's tale. I couldn't stomach this last as a whole that bloody battle stuff is so stale that it gives me what Sterling called "the Molossian pip." [REH, BOTD in 1906.]

One last snippet of CAS on Poe in honor of Poe’s birthday: It is damnable to reflect that America has either killed her finest artists or has driven them into exile. Poe certainly died from hardship rather than drink…

CAS on HPL and Poe: "The Outsider" is a masterpiece of shadowy cobweb horror, with illimitable suggestive values and overtones. Honestly, I think it more successful than two-thirds of Poe! [Illustration by Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu (1902--1988), her third and last for Weird Tales]

Yet more CAS on Poe: My real education began with the reading of Robinson Crusoe (unabridged), Gulliver's Travels, the fairy tales of Andersen and the Countless D'Aulnoy, the Arabian Nights and (at the age of 13) Poe's Poems.

More CAS on Poe: In much of Poe's best work, the atmospheric elements are so subtly blended, unified and pervasive as to make analysis rather difficult. Something beyond and above the mere words and images seems to well from the entire fabric of the work, like the "pestilent and mystic vapor"…

CAS thoughts on Poe: Unique, was the thrill with which I discovered for myself the poems of Poe in a grammar-school library; and, despite the objurgations of the librarian, who considered Poe "unwholesome," carried the priceless volume home to revel for enchanted days in its undreamt-of melodies.

The Poet in A Barroom Faces of the four seasons Throng the bar: One peers from a time-lost star. (Likely the actual Auburn barroom pictured below - Happy 133rd Birthday, CAS)

My lips are moist, and I know the art of losing in a deep bed the antiquated conscience.

But, ah, it was a thousand years ago I took the lovely lamia for bride... And nevermore shall they that meet me know It is a thousand years since I have died.

Sitting for I knew not how long on its bleak basaltic shores, where grew but a few fleshly red orchids, bent above the waters like open and thirsty mouths, I would peer with countless fantastic conjectures and shadowy imaginings, into the alluring mystery of its unknown and inexplorable gulf.

I write the poems down Line by line from old anthologies Printed on the air and ether, Shelved amid the leaves of trees, Between the stars, or under stones And mouldered bones.

In their lidless implacable eyes of staring stone, is the petrified despair of those who have gazed too long on the infinite.

These beings, known as the Ispazars … had become formidable sorcerers and had developed an intellection beyond that of their kind, together with many esoteric faculties. Preserving the cold and evilly cryptic nature of reptiles, they had made themselves the masters of an abhuman science.

Ancient and imperial wines were poured for them in moonstone cups by the fleshless hands of their servitors; and they drank and feasted and revelled in fantasmagoric pomp, deferring till the morrow the resurrectiom of those who lay dead in Yethlyreom.

But still there were compensations: the fungus-wine of the Ydheems was potent though evil-tasting; and there were females of a sort, if one were not too squeamish.

The voices of the necromancers mounted and fell as if in some unholy paean. Imperious, exigent, they seemed to implore the consummation of forbidden blasphemy. Like thronging phantoms, writhing and swirling with malignant life, the vapors rose about the couches…

We, the friars of Perigon, and all others who have knowledge of this thing, agree that its advent was coeval with the first rising of the red comet which still burns nightly, a flying balefire, above the moonless hills.

In Averoigne the lamia sings To lyres restored from tombs antique, And lets her coiling tresses fall Before a necromantic glass. She sees her vein-drawn lovers pass, Faintly they cry to her, and all The bale they find, the bliss they seek, Is echoed in the tarnished strings That tell archaic things.

The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.

The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . . While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,

There was the same sense of utter loss and alienation…the same vertiginous, overwhelming bewilderment, the same ghastly sense of separation from all the familiar environmental details that give color, form and definition to our lives and even determine our very personalities.

Beneath, immeasurably beneath, at recurrent intervals, I hear a hollow and solemn sound. Perhaps it is the sigh of sunken waters ... of cavern-straying winds ... or the respiration of One that abides in the darkness, meting with his breath the slow minutes, the hours, the days, the ages...

But in the mirror a scene limned itself darkly, and he seemed to look on the marble towers of the city of Miraab beneath overlooming bastions of ominous cloud…and he saw the palace hall where Famorgh nodded in wine-stained purple, senile and drunken, amid his ministers and sycophants.

Subtle and manifold are the nets of the Demon, who followeth his chosen from birth to death and from death to death, throughout many lives. —The Testaments of Carnamagos

For Quachil Uttaus is the ultimate corruption; and the instant of his coming is like the passage of many ages; and neither flesh nor stone may abide his treading, but all things crumble beneath it atom from atom. And for this, some have called him The Treader of the Dust.

Immense and drear and gray beneath a waning sun, far-fissured with enormous chasms, and covered from pole to pole with the never-ebbing tides of the desert sand, it hung in space without moon or satellite, an abomination and a token of doom to fairer and younger worlds.

…delirious rites were done to the gods who stared forth with unchanging eyes of stone and metal to the hopeless heavens; and the priests and worshippers drugged themselves with terrible opiates, and sought the stupefying ecstacy of abandonment to an hysteria both carnal and devout.

The gray mists and the grayer houses were full of the menace of memory: they were like traitorous tombs from which the cadavers of dead hours poured forth to assail me with envenomed fangs and talons.

It is all strange, unreal, immaterial. The loss of normal gravity makes me feel like a phantom; and I seem to live in a phantom world. My thoughts, my memories, my despair — all are no more than mists that waver on the verge of oblivion.... And yet, by some fantastic irony, I am worshipped as a god!

The world itself, in the end, shall be turned to a round cipher. -Old prophecy of Zothique

Uccastrog, which lay far to the east of Cyntrom, was commonly known as the Isle of the Torturers; and men said that all who landed upon it unaware, or were cast thither by the seas, were imprisoned by the inhabitants and were subjected later to unending curious tortures…

And now I must make an end, and enclose this writing in the sealed cylinder of orichalchum, and fling it forth to drift upon the wave. For the space between my shadow and the shadow of the horror is straitened momently. . . . and the space is no wider than the thickness of a wizard's pen.

On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood.

The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.

By this potent Sign, O jealous king who dreaded cuckoldom, Murder shall not avert from your proud head The horns of that opprobrium: for I know A spell whereby the dead will cuckold you.

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume The spaceward-flown horizons infinite. -Clark Ashton Smith