Vow, taken long ago, be strong in our hearts to-day.  Here where the pain is fiercer, to rest is more sweet.  Here where beauty dies away, it is more joy to be lulled in dreams.  Here the good, the true, our hope, seem but a madness born of ancient pain.  Out of rest, dream, or despair, let us arise.  Let us go the way the Great Ones go.

—­July, 1894

The Story of a Star

The emotion that haunted me in that little cathedral town would be most difficult to describe.  After the hurry, rattle, and fever of the city, the rare weeks spent here were infinitely peaceful.  They were full of a quaint sense of childhood, with sometimes a deeper chord touched—­the giant and spiritual things childhood has dreams of.  The little room I slept in had opposite its window the great grey cathedral wall; it was only in the evening that the sunlight crept round it and appeared in the room strained through the faded green blind.  It must have been this silvery quietness of colour which in some subtle way affected me with the feeling of a continual Sabbath; and this was strengthened by the bells chiming hour after hour:  the pathos, penitence, and hope expressed by the flying notes coloured the intervals with faint and delicate memories.  They haunted my dreams, and I heard with unutterable longing the astral chimes pealing from some dim and vast cathedral of the cosmic memory, until the peace they tolled became almost a nightmare, and I longed for utter oblivion or forgetfulness of their reverberations.

More remarkable were the strange lapses into other worlds and times.  Almost as frequent as the changing of the bells were the changes from state to state.  I realised what is meant by the Indian philosophy of Maya.  Truly my days were full of Mayas, and my work-a-day city life was no more real to me than one of those bright, brief glimpses of things long past.  I talk of the past, and yet these moments taught me how false our ideas of time are.  In the ever-living yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow are words of no meaning.  I know I fell into what we call the past and the things I counted as dead for ever were the things I had yet to endure.  Out of the old age of earth I stepped into its childhood, and received once more the primal blessing of youth, ecstasy, and beauty.  But these things are too vast and vague to speak of; the words we use to-day cannot tell their story.  Nearer to our time is the legend that follows.

I was, I thought, one of the Magi of old Persia, inheritor of its unforgotten lore, and using some of its powers.  I tried to pierce through the great veil of nature, and feel the life that quickened it within.  I tried to comprehend the birth and growth of planets, and to do this I rose spiritually and passed beyond earth’s confines into that seeming void which is the matrix where they germinate.  On one of these journeys I was struck by the phantasm, so it