her mother's side,
and felt the unborn child moving within, did she murmur, "Baby, baby?"

When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is
it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond
his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think; all my birds'
adventures started when I hung a little saucer at one side of the cage,
and at the other a bundle of hair and grass; but our images must be given
to us, we cannot choose them deliberately.

VIII

I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long
memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the
child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that
genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our
trivial daily mind. There are, indeed, personifying spirits that we had
best call but Gates and Gate-keepers, because through their dramatic power
they bring our souls to crisis, to Mask and Image, caring not a straw
whether we be Juliet going to her wedding, or Cleopatra to her death; for
in their eyes nothing has weight but passion. We have dreamed a foolish
dream these many centuries in thinking that they value a life of
contemplation, for they scorn that more than any possible life, unless it
be but a name for the worst crisis of all. They have but one purpose, to
bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without
despair. They contrived Dante's banishment, and snatched away his
Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to
gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might
through passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all to Mask
and Image, and so be phantoms in their own eyes. In great lesser writers
like Landor and like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask as
something set apart; Andromeda and her Perseus--though not the
sea-dragon--but in a few in whom we recognise supreme masters of tragedy,
the whole contest is brought into the circle of their beauty. Such
masters, Villon and Dante, let us say, would not, when they speak through
their art, change their luck; yet they are mirrored in all the suffering
of desire. The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that
they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens,
being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self. We
gaze at such men in awe, because we