nd it may be
the moon also:

"The horror of my virginity
Delights me, and I would envelope me
In the terror of my tresses, that, by night,
Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white
And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire,
Thou that art chaste and diest of desire,
White night of ice and of the cruel snow!
Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo
My dreams uplifted before thee! now, apart,
So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart,
And all about me lives but in mine own
Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride,
Mirroring this Herodiade diamond-eyed."

Yet I am certain that there was something in myself compelling me to
attempt creation of an art as separate from everything heterogenous and
casual, from all character and circumstance, as some Herodiade of our
theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle.
Certainly I had gone a great distance from my first poems, from all that I
had copied from the folk-art of Ireland, as from the statue of Mausolus
and his Queen, where the luminous circle is motionless and contains the
entire popular life; and yet why am I so certain? I can imagine an Aran
Islander who had strayed into the Luxembourg Gallery, turning bewildered
from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but lingering at Moreau's
"Jason," to study in minute astonishment the elaborate background, where
there are so many jewels, so much wrought stone and moulded bronze. Had
not lover promised mistress in his own island song, "A ship with a gold
and silver mast, gloves of the skin of a fish, and shoes of the skin of a
bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland?"

XII

Hitherto when in London I had stayed with my family in Bedford Park, but
now I was to live for some twelve months in chambers in the Temple that
opened through a little passage into those of Arthur Symons. If anybody
rang at either door, one or other would look through a window in the
connecting passage, and report. We would then decide whether one or both
should receive the visitor, whether his door or mine should be opened, or
whether both doors were to remain closed. I have never liked London, but
London seemed less disagreeable when one could walk in quiet, empty places
after dark, and upon a Sunday morning sit upon the margin of a fountain
almost as alone as if in the country. I was already settled there, I
imagine, when a publisher called and proposed that Symons should edit a
Review or Magazine, a