I have read your letters with my door locked late at night

I have read your letters with my door locked late at night and I have read them on the seashore where I could look all round me and see no more sign of human life than the ships out at sea and here I often found myself waking up from a reverie with the book open before me. Sometimes a word or a phrase of yours takes me away from the world around me and places me in an ideal land surrounded by realities more than any letter I ever read.

- Bram Stoker Letter to Walt Whitman, February 1872