EARTH, FIRE AND WATER

Some French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are.  I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children.  If we knew the Fire Worshippers better we might find that their centuries of pious observance have been rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image.  Images form themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some pool.  We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Gods everywhere.  We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories of all the rest of Europe.  Even to-day our country people speak with the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision.  We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.  Did not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of water, and that “even the generation of images in the mind is from water”?

1902.

THE OLD TOWN

I fell, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the power of faery.

I had gone with a young man and his sister—­friends and relations of my own—­to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were coming home talking over what he had told us.  It was dark, and our imaginations were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and waking, where Sphinxes and Chimaeras sit open-eyed and where there are always murmurings and whisperings.  I cannot think that what we saw was an imagination of the waking mind.  We had come under some trees that made the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly across the road.  Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not see anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a ruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called “the Old Town,” which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell’s day.  We had stood for some few minutes, so far as I can recollect, looking over the fields full of stones and brambles and elder-bushes, when I saw a small bright light on the horizon, as it seemed, mounting up slowly towards the sky; then