The poet who praises the splendors and terrors of life in the dance-measures of his verse, the musician who sounds them in a pure, eternal present -- these are bringers of light, increasers of joy and brightness on earth, even if they lead us first through tears and stress.  Perhaps the poet whose verses gladden us was a sad solitary, and the musician a melancholic dreamer; but even so their work shares in the cheerful serenity of the gods and the stars.  What they give us is no longer their darkness, their suffering or fears, but a drop of pure light, eternal cheerfulness.

-- Hermann Hesse
(in The Glass Bead Game, or Magister Ludi,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston)