III

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    I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon a shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on the point of returning, and I would half?remember, with aasy of joy or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; in to plate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors, desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and then I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this feeling passed perfectly away, and even now, when I  have sought refuge in the only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those people with i personali<mark></mark>ties, who gather in the chapels aing?places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was hysterica passio or sheer madness, if you will, but was so powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake again and drive me from my new?found peace.

    When we came in the grey light to the great half?empty terminus, it seemed to me I was so ged that I was no more, as man is, a moment shuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over a moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallen asleep, as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign of all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my excited mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me that the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denou the bidding of beings greater or less than man. This is not Michael Robartes at all: Michael Robartes is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years perhaps, I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverish sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little town, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in the  light. I had been too pre?occupied to ask where we were going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but I knew now from the dire of the sun that we were goiward; and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards the east, that we were approag the western coast. Then immediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the left, its dull grey broken into white patches and lines.

    When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, a out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a great promontory, I realized with a new perfe what a shock had been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed some mysterious ge had not taken pla the substany mind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part of a teeming, fantastier life; and when Michael Robartes poio a square a?looking house, with a much smaller and newer building us lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and almost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, I ossessed with the phantasy that the sea, which kept c it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part of some indefinite and passionate life, which had begun to on our orderly and careful days, and was about to pluhe world into a night as obscure as that which followed the downfall of the classical world. One part of my mind mocked this phantastic terror, but the other, the part that still lay half plunged in vision, listeo the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimaginable fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.

    We had go a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old man, who was evidently a wat, for he sat in a barrel, close to a place where masons had been lately w upon a break in the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung uinkers carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say, for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel, and I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. assed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, Idolaters, idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down to Hell that the herrings may e again into the bay; and for some moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us. Are you not afraid, I said, that these wild fishing people may do some desperate thing against you?

    I and mine, he answered, are long past human hur<bdo></bdo>t or help, being incorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be the mation of the supreme work. A time will e for these people also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fish to some new divinity, unless iheir own divihe Dagda, with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in poppy? juice lest it rush forth hot for battle. Aengus, with the three birds on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic children of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stoheir reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the Sidhe still pass in every wind, and dand play at hurley, and fight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they ot build their temples again till there have been  martyrdoms and victories, and perhaps even that long?foretold battle in the Valley of the Black Pig.

    Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward side, to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every moment to lift us off our feet, we made our way in sileo the door of the square building. Michael Robartes ope with a key, on which I saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare passage and up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with bookshelves. A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must submit to a tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with it a book on the doe ahod of the Order, over which I was to spend what remained of the winter daylight. He the me, promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searg among the bookshelves<samp>?</samp>, and found one of the most exhaustive alchemical libraries I have ever seen. There were the works of Morienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair?cloth; of Avia, who was a drunkard a trolled numberless legions of spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that he could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deadly trance as he would; of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock; of Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very few mystics but alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of the devotion to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense of beauty, which Robartes would hold aable sequence; but I did notice a plete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of William Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his illumination and were like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew. I noted also many poets and prose writers of every age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as ihe greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us, as a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in their fiery chariots.

    Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a little fruit upoable. I judged that she had once been handsome, but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had I seen her anywhere else, aement of the flesh and a thirst for pleasure, instead of which it doubtless was aement of the imagination and a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question ing the ceremony, but getting no answer except a shake of the head, saw that I must await initiation in silence. When I had eaten, she came again, and having laid a curiously wrought bronze box oable, lighted the dles, and took away the plates and the remnants. So soon as I was alone, I turo the box, and found that the peacocks of Hera spread out their tails over the sides and lid, against a background, on which were wrought great stars, as though to affirm that the heavens were a part of their glory. In the box was a book bound in vellum, and having upon the vellum and in very delicate colours, and in gold, the alchemical rose with many spears thrusting against it, but in vain, as was shown by the shattered points of those o the petals. The book was written upon vellum, and iiful clear letters, interspersed with symbolical pictures and illuminations, after the manner of the Splendor Soils.

    The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic dest, gave themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, ohe mystery of the Peli, ahe mystery of the green Dragon, ahe mystery of the Eagle, ahat of Salt and Mercury. What seemed a succession of acts, but was, the book declared, the trivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the garden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talked together the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradual distillation of the tents of the soul, until they were ready to put off the mortal and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustling among the vine?leaves overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning upon a stick, and, sitting close to them, took up the thought where they had dropped it. Having expouhe whole principle of spiritual alchemy, and bid them found the Order of the Alchemical Rose, she passed from among them, and when they would have followed she was o be seen. They formed themselves into an Order, holding their goods and making their researches in on, and, as they became perfe the alchemical doe, apparitions came a among them, and taught them more and more marvellous mysteries. The book the on to expound so much of these as the neophyte ermitted to know, dealing at the outset and at siderable length with the indepe reality of our thoughts, which was, it declared, the doe from which all true does rose. If you imagi said, the semblance of a living  being, it is at once possessed by a wandering soul, and goes hither and thither w good or evil, until the moment of its death has e; and gave many examples, received, it said, from many gods. Eros had taught them how to fashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper what they would into sle<big>.</big>eping minds; and Ate forms from which demonic beings could pour madness, or u dreams, into sleeping blood; and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside it would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but the mightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly, the hound would be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound soon die; and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dove ed with silver and had it flutter over your head, its soft g would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood over mortal sleep; and all divinities alike had revealed with many warnings and lamentations that all minds are tinually giving birth to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on, you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life; but the divine powers would only appear iiful shapes, which are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half?shut eyes, into a sleepy stillness. The bodiless souls who desded into these forms were what men called the moods; and worked all great ges in the world; for just as the magi or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out of the mind of the magi or the artist, or if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what shape they would, and through its void its gestures pour themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were aplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first desding like a faint sigh into mens minds and then ging their thoughts and their as until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as though they were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book tained symbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution to divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape for any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avia among those who live uhe roots obbr>.99lｉｂ?</abbr>f tears and of laughter.

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