“I remember that, from the first measures [of Wagner's Lohengrin] I experienced one of those happy impressions that almost all imaginative men have known in dreams. I felt myself freed from the bonds of gravity. . . . Next, involuntarily, I imagined to myself the delightful state of a man gripped by a great dream in an absolute solitude, but a solitude with an immense horizon and filled with a vast diffused light; an immensity with no décor except itself. Soon I experienced the sensation of a brighter light, of an intensity of light increasing so quickly that none of the nuances furnished by the dictionary would suffice to express this always renascent increase of brilliance and whiteness. Then I had the full realization of a soul moving in a luminous milieu, of an ecstasy composed of pleasure and knowledge, and soaring above and far away from the natural world.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1861