I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession which I was trying to throw off and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately but write from recollection and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
