conquered, into extreme old age,
all lost but the favour of his muses.

The mother of the muses we are taught
Is memory; she has left me; they remain
And shake my shoulder urging me to sing.

Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not
suffer any longer. He will buy perhaps some small old house where like
Ariosto he can dig his garden, and think that in the return of birds and
leaves, or moon and sun, and in the evening flight of the rooks he may
discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of
vision. Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years,
honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find,
forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust.

_February_ 25, 1917.

ANIMA MUNDI

I

I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and
Japanese poets, old women in Connaught, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom
I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their
village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity; to immerse it in the
general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun
to call "the subconscious"; to liberate it from all that comes of councils
and committees, from the world as it is seen from universities or from
populous towns; and that I might so believe I have murmured evocations and
frequented mediums, delighted in all that displayed great problems
through sensuous images, or exciting phrases, accepting from abstract
schools but a few technical words that are so old they seem but broken
architraves fallen amid bramble and grass, and have put myself to school
where all things are seen: _A Tenedo Tacitae per Amica Silentia Lunae_. At
one time I thought to prove my conclusions by quoting from diaries where I
have recorded certain strange events the moment they happened, but now I
have changed my mind--I will but say like the Arab boy that became Vizier:
"O brother, I have taken stock in the desert sand and of the sayings of
antiquity."

II

There is a letter of Goethe's, though I cannot remember where, that
explains evocation, though he was but thinking of literature. He described
some friend who had complained of literary sterility as too intelligent.
One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one
criticises. "If one is critical too soon," he wrote, "they will not form
at all." If you suspend the critical faculty, I have d