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My reverie was broken by a loud knog at the door, and I wohe more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life. Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and, taking one of the silver dlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to desd the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the sound poured through every er and crevice of the house there was no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were so few, my part in life so little, they had begun to e and go as they would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence of a world from which I had drivehing but dreams suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, somethiween a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had retly e to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter of importance: ihe only matter of importance for him and for me. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and remembering the magic power ne had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled with munoya this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler days, before mens minds, subtilized and plicated by the romantient in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined revelation.I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the light of the dle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many?
coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not uand, that some singular and ued thing was about to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a little less bronze ser, set, uposide, with pieces of painted a by Orazio Fontana, which I had filled with antique amulets, had fallen upon its side and poured out its tents, I began to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to collect my thoughts and partly with that habitual reverence which seemed to me the due of things so long ected with secret hopes and fears. I see, said Michael Robartes, that you are still fond of inse, and I show you an inse more precious than any you have ever seen, and as he spoke he took the ser out of my hand and put the amulets in a little heap betweehanor and the alembic. I sat down, a down at the side of the fire, and sat there for awhile looking into the fire, and holding the ser in his hand. I have e to ask you something, he said, and the inse will fill the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we are talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made from flowers, of one kind w<cite>藏书网</cite>ith the flowers that laid their heavy purple petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath, until he cried against the cross and his destiny. He shook some dust into the ser out of a small silk bag, ahe ser upon the floor and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that spread out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it was like Miltons banyan tree. It filled me, as inse often does, with a faint sleepiness, so that I started when he said, I have e to ask you that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you left Paris rather than answer.
He had turned his eyes towards me, and I saw them glitter in the firelight, and through the inse, as I replied: You mean, will I bee an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would not sent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now that I have at last fashioned my life acc to my desire, am I likely to sent?
You have ged greatly sihen, he answered. I have read your books, and now I see you among all these images, and I uand you better than you do yourself, for I have been with many and many dreamers at the same cross?ways. You have shut away the world and gathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself at their feet, you will be always full of lassitude, and of wavering purpose, for a man must fet he is miserable in the bustle and noise of the multitude in this world and in time; or seek a mystical union with the multitude who govern this world and time. And then he murmured something I could not hear, and as though to someone I could not see.
For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he was about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkhe peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense colour. I cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely caused by memory, and by the twilight of inse, for I would not aowledge that he could overy now mature intellect; and I said: Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some form of worship, why should I go to Eleusis and not to Calvary? He leaned forward and began speaking with a slightly rhythmical intonation, and as he spoke I had tle again with the shadow, as of some ht than the night of the sun, which began to dim the light of the dles and to blot out the little gleams upon the er of picture? frames and on the bronze divinities, and to turn the blue of the inse to a heavy purple; while it left the peacocks to glimmer and glow as though each separate colour were a living spirit. I had fallen into a profound dream?like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. Ahere is no one who unes with only one god, he was saying, and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined uanding, the mods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he e uhe power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the bodys will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and uhe power of all those tless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the moders and romance writers, and uhe power of the old divinities, who sihe Renaissance have wohing of their a worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of inse.
The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it uhem again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay ihlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.
He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had bee in my waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have bee inexplicably silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in the world. They have e to us; they have e to us, the voice began again; all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you have met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the thuorm, and he laughs because you thought yourself aence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is aernal god; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as though all the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and there is the mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spell over men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might reign alone, but she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is a god; and there, O swiftly she es! is Aphrodite under a twilight falling from the wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet are the grey and white doves. In the midst of my dream I saw him hold out his left arm and pass his right hand over it as though he stroked the wings of doves. I made a violent effort which seemed almost to tear me in two, and said with forced determination: You would sweep me away into an indefinite world which fills me with terror; a a man is a great man just in so far as he make his mind reflect everything with indifferent precision like a mirror. I seemed to be perfectly master of myself, a on, but more rapidly: I and you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin to dee, and into minds when they begin to decay. I had grown suddenly angry, and seizing the alembi the table, was about to rise and strike him with it, when the peacocks on the door behind him appeared to grow immense; and then the alembic fell from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and blue and bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard a distant voice saying: Our master Avia has written that all life proceeds out of corruption. The glitterihers had now covered me pletely, and I khat I had struggled for hundreds of years, and was quered at last. I was sinking into the depth when the green and blue and brohat seemed to fill the world became a sea of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard a voice over my head cry, The mirror is broken in two pieces, and another voiswer, The mirror is broken in four pieces, and a more distant voice cry with aant cry, The mirror is broken into numberless pieces; and then a multitude of pale hands were reag towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were fotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the tide of flame, a my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will, everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise through numberless panies of beings who were, I uood, in some way more certain than thought, each ed in his eternal moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half?closed eyelids. And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they had almost ceased to be, and, having erange moods, melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passed into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had ever lived seemed to e and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen from the certainty of vision into the uainty of dream, and bee a drop of molten gold falli<big>９９lｉb?</big>ng with immense rapidity, through a night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the wailing of the wind in the ey, and I awoke to find myself leaning upoable and supp my head with my hands. I saw the alembic swaying from side to side in the distant er it had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watg me and waiting. I will go wherever you will, I said, and do whatever you bid me, for I have been with eternal things. I knew, he replied, you must need answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must e to a great distance, for we were ao build our temple between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of men.
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