other too, there is a stone
platform where meditative persons might pace to and fro. I planned a
mystical Order which should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place
where its members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where
we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace; and for
ten years to come my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to find
philosophy and to create ritual for that Order. I had an unshakeable
conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates
would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as
they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of
devotion in all imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for
special manual an Irish literature which, though made by many minds, would
seem the work of a single mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary
association into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy would be
altogether pagan, for it was plain that its symbols must be selected from
all those things that had moved men most during many, mainly Christian,
centuries.

I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it _The Rose_,
because of the Rose's double meaning; of a fisherman who had "never a
crack" in his heart; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the
young, or of some cheerful fiddler, all those things that "popular poets"
write of, but that I must some day, on that day when the gates began to
open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm that still echoed Morris
I prayed to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty:

"Come near, come near, come near--ah, leave me still
A little space for the Rose-breath to fill,
Lest I no more hear common things....
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chant a tongue men do not know."

I do not remember what I meant by "the bright hearts," but a little later
I wrote of Spirits "with mirrors in their hearts."

My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by
that method Mathers had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged
without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are
warned against in those _Oracles_ which antiquity has attributed to
Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet. "Stoop not
down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless
dep