He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been playing hurley, for “they looked as if it was that.”  Sometimes they would vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of the bodies of the two men in dark clothes.  These two men were of the size of living men, but the others were small.  He saw them for about half-an-hour, and then the old man he and those about him were working for took up a whip and said, “Get on, get on, or we will have no work done!” I asked if he saw the faeries too, “Oh, yes, but he did not want work he was paying wages for to be neglected.”  He made every body work so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.

1902.

A VISIONARY

A young man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else.  I questioned him about his life and his doings.  He had written many poems and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of the artist was bad for him, he feared.  He recited his poems readily, however.  He had them all in his memory.  Some indeed had never been written down.  They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds,[FN#1] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen.  Suddenly it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly.  “Do you see anything, X-----?” I said.  “A shining, winged woman, covered by her long hair, is standing near the doorway,” he answered, or some such words.  “Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us, and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form?” I said; for I am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion of their speech.  “No,” he replied; “for if it were the thoughts of a person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail.  It is a spirit.  It is some one who is dead or who has never lived.”

[FN#1] I wrote this sentence long ago.  This sadness now seems to me a part of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the world.  I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I used to be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged.  We once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser.

I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop.  His pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles into his care.  Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging, more than one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and sun them as it were in the subtle light of his mind.  Sometimes visions come to him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told divers people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and left them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce more than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.