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IV
These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing
away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is
sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His
travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to
sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does
not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful
things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos
of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and
incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar
Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as
Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of
emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of
beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed
so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common
sights of the world. He describes the dance in the air of large
butterflies as we have seen it in the sun-steeped air of noon. 'And
they danced but danced idly, on the wings of the air, as some haughty
queen of distant conquered lands might in her poverty and exile dance
in some encampment of the gipsies for the mere bread to live by, but
beyond this would never abate her pride to dance for one fragment
more.' He can show us the movement of sand, as we have seen it where
the sea shore meets the grass, but so changed that it becomes the
deserts of the world: 'and all that night the desert said many things
softly and in a whisper but I knew not what he said. Only the sand
knew and arose and was troubled and lay down again and the wind knew.
Then, as the hours of the night went by, these two discovered the
foot-tracks wherewith we had disturbed the holy desert and they
troubled over them and covered them up; and then the wind lay down and
the sand rested.' Or he will invent some incredible sound that will
yet call before us the strange sounds of the night, as when he says,
'sometimes some monster of the river coughed.' And how he can play
upon our fears with that great gate of his carved from a single ivory
tusk dropped by some terrible beast; or with his tribe of wanderers
that pass about the city telling one another tales that we know to
be terrible from the blanched faces of the listeners though they tell
them in an unknown tongue; or with his stone gods of the mountain, for
'when we see rock walking it is terrible' 'rock should not walk in the
evening.'
Yet say what I will, so strange is the pleasure that they give, so
hard to analyse and describe, I do not know why these stories and
plays delight me. Now they set me thinking of some old Irish jewel
work, now of a sword covered with Indian Arabesques that hangs in a
friend's hall, now of St. Mark's at Venice, now of cloud palaces at
the sundown; but more often still of a strange country or state of the
soul that once for a few weeks I entered in deep sleep and after lost
and have ever mourned and desired.
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