breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed
upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the
forest? The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars
within His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch's precepts and
the experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to
servant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange living man
may win for Daemon an illustrious dead man; but now I add another thought:
the Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man
and Daemon feed the hunger in one another's hearts. Because the ghost is
simple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together
when the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of
all the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only.

The more insatiable in all desire, the more resolute to refuse deception
or an easy victory, the more close will be the bond, the more violent and
definite the antipathy.

VIII

I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours
in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in _Wilhelm Meister_,
accident is destiny; and I think it was Heraclitus who said: the Daemon is
our destiny. When I think of life as a struggle with the Daemon who would
ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand
why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man
loves nothing but his destiny. In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is
called, as though to call him something that summed up all heroism, "Doom
eager." I am persuaded that the Daemon delivers and deceives us, and that
he wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder.
Then my imagination runs from Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an
analogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has bid
us look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike,
among those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astrologers
say; and that it may be "sexual love," which is "founded upon spiritual
hate," is an image of the warfare of man and Daemon; and I even wonder if
there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark
between Daemon and sweetheart. I remember how often women, when in love,
grow superstitious, and believe that they can bring their lovers good
luck; and I remember an old Irish s