I remember how pure, holy and beautiful these imaginations seemed ......how they came like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life....The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it would raise but an instant I knew I would be in Paradise.

the heart of the hills was opened to me, and I knew there was no hill for those who were there, and they were unconscious of the ponderous mountains piled above the palaces of light, and the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of colour as an opal, as they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all about me, and it was we who had been blind to it but that it had never passed away from the world.

J B Priestley – Margin Released

Russell …. was far from being great in painting, poetry, criticism ; yet he was undoubtedly a great man; a triumphant proof of the idea that so long as a man guards against intolerance and anger, it is better to believe in too much than to believe in too little. He was one of those who seem to spend a life with us almost in innocent bewilderment, because they come from some larger, nobler race. He had some economic and political ideas that are not behind our time but ahead of it; he proved himself a more practical man than the hard-headed realists; and during the years when Ireland was at war with the British Government and then with herself it was to this seer, this poet and painter of gods, demigods, angels, fairies, that men turned in the dark and confusion, aware then of his strength, his steadfastness.
One of his favourite beliefs was that in this age we have disinherited ourselves. As he wrote to a friend: 'We have imagined ourselves into littleness, darkness and ignorance, and we have to imagine ourselves back into light.' That was thirty years ago; nothing much has happened since to prove he was wrong.