I have described what image??always opposite to the natural self or the natural world??Wilde, Henley, Morris copied or tried to copy, but I have not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself and much less of that anti?self: probably the woman who y dinner or the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for versation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest vi, that I love proud and lonely images. When I was a child a daily to the sextons daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing s upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself tarious Shelleys dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow studying philosophy in some loower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge, hidden from human sight in some shell?strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore. One passage above all raually in my ears??
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream He re?Adamite, and has survived Cycles of geion and of ruin. The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence, And quering penance of the mutinous flesh, Deep plation and unwearied study, In years outstretched beyond the date of man, May have attaio snty and sce Over those strong a things and thoughts Which others fear and know not.
MAHMUD I would talk With this old Jew.
HASSAN Thy will is even now Made known to him where he dwells in a sea?cavern Mid the Demonesi, less accessible Than thod! He who would question him Must sail alo su where the stream Of o sleeps around those foamless isles, When the young moon is westering as now, And evening airs wander upon the wave; And, when the pines of that bee?pasturing isle, Greehus, quench the fieryshadow Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water, Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud Ahasuerus! and the caverns round Will answer Ahasuerus! If his prayer Be granted, a faieor will arise, Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind Will rush out of the sighing pine?forest, And with the wind a storm of harmony Unutterably sweet, and pilot him Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus: The the hour and plad circumsta for the matter of their ferehe Jeears. Few dare, and few who dare Win the desired union.
Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like; and, apart from whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien?Lepage, I saw nothing against his reality. Presently having heard that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from India, I thought it time to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed anywhere in the world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no duty to us, uning with God only, g nothing from fear or favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single mind and taste, believed that such meed and paid them that honour, or paid it to their mere shadow, which they have refused to philanthropists and to men of learning?
I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she said, three followers left??the Society of Psychical Research had just reported on her Indian phenomena??and as one of the three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time kig my h