ession and of that wild air the bard had always
about him in my boyish imagination. They will go here and there speaking
their verses and their little stories wherever they can find a score or
two of poetical-minded people in a big room, or a couple of
poetical-minded friends sitting by the hearth, and poets will write them
poems and little stories to the confounding of print and paper. I, at any
rate, from this out mean to write all my longer poems for the stage, and
all my shorter ones for the Psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to
my good resolutions.

1902.

MAGIC

I

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call
magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know
what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions
of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe
in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early
times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These
doctrines are--

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds
can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind,
a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our
memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I
have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in
handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain
ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a
quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the
world.

II

Some ten or twelve years ago, a man with whom I have since quarrelled for
sound reasons, a very singular man who had given his life to studies other
men despised, asked me and an acquaintance, who is now dead, to witness a
magical work. He lived a little way from London, and on the way my
acquaintance told me that he did not believe in magic, but that a novel of
Bulwer Lytton's had taken such a hold upon his imagination that he was
going to give much of his time and all his thought to magic. He longed to
believe in it, and had studied, though not learnedly, geomancy, astrology,
chiromancy, and much cabalistic symbolism, and yet doubted if the soul
ou