weaving into verse, I would never have known that meditation had become
trance, for I would have been like one who does not know that he is
passing through a wood because his eyes are on the pathway. So I think
that in the making and in the understanding of a work of art, and the more
easily if it is full of patterns and symbols and music, we are lured to
the threshold of sleep, and it may be far beyond it, without knowing that
we have ever set our feet upon the steps of horn or of ivory.

IV

Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,--and in this
sense all alluring or hateful things are symbols, although their relations
with one another are too subtle to delight us fully, away from rhythm and
pattern,--there are intellectual symbols, symbols that evoke ideas alone,
or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the very definite traditions
of mysticism and the less definite criticism of certain modern poets,
these alone are called symbols. Most things belong to one or another kind,
according to the way we speak of them and the companions we give them, for
symbols, associated with ideas that are more than fragments of the shadows
thrown upon the intellect by the emotions they evoke, are the playthings
of the allegorist or the pedant, and soon pass away. If I say 'white' or
'purple' in an ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively
that I cannot say why they move me; but if I say them in the same mood, in
the same breath with such obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a
crown of thorns, I think of purity and sovereignty; while innumerable
other meanings, which are held to one another by the bondage of subtle
suggestion, and alike in the emotions and in the intellect, move visibly
through my mind, and move invisibly beyond the threshold of sleep, casting
lights and shadows of an indefinable wisdom on what had seemed before, it
may be, but sterility and noisy violence. It is the intellect that decides
where the reader shall ponder over the procession of the symbols, and if
the symbols are merely emotional, he gazes from amid the accidents and
destinies of the world; but if the symbols are intellectual too, he
becomes himself a part of pure intellect, and he is himself mingled with
the procession. If I watch a rushy pool in the moonlight, my emotion at
its beauty is mixed with memories of the man that I have seen ploughing by
its margin, or of the lovers I saw there a night ago; but i