the
Cathedral that she did not "see it after," and spoke of seeing in this way
the gates of Purgatory.

Furthermore, if my images could affect her dreams, the folk-images could
affect mine in turn, for one night I saw between sleeping and waking a
strange long bodied pair of dogs, one black and one white, that I found
presently in some country tale. How, too, could one separate the dogs of
the country tale from those my uncle heard bay in his pillow? In order to
keep myself from nightmare, I had formed the habit of imagining four
watch-dogs, one at each corner of my room, and, though I had not told him
or anybody, he said, "Here is a very curious thing; most nights now, when
I lay my head upon the pillow, I hear a sound of dogs baying--the sound
seems to come up out of the pillow." A friend of Strindberg's, in
_delirium tremens_, was haunted by mice, and a friend in the next room
heard the squealing of the mice.

VI

To that multiplicity of interest and opinion, of arts and sciences, which
had driven me to conceive a Unity of Culture defined and evoked by Unity
of Image, I had but added a multiplicity of images, and I was the more
troubled because, the first excitement over, I had done nothing to rouse
George Pollexfen from the gloom and hypochondria always thickening about
him. I asked no help of books, for I believed that the truth I sought
would come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of
passionate experience, and that if I filled my exposition with other men's
thought, other men's investigation, I would sink into all that
multiplicity of interest and opinion. That passionate experience could
never come--of that I was certain--until I had found the right image or
right images. From what but the image of Apollo, fixed always in memory
and passion, did his priesthood get that occasional power, a classical
historian has described, of lifting great stones and snapping great
branches; and did not Gemma Galgani, like many others that had gone
before, in 1889 cause deep wounds to appear in her body by contemplating
her crucifix? In the essay that Wilde read to me one Christmas Day,
occurred these words--"What does not the world owe to the imitation of
Christ, what to the imitation of Caesar?" and I had seen Macgregor Mathers
paint little pictures combining the forms of men, animals, and birds,
according to a rule which provided a form for every possible mental
condition, and I had heard him describing,