akes
me love, is more like innocence. I am in the place where the daemon is,
but I do not think he is with me until I begin to make a new personality,
selecting among those images, seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out
of conceit with daily diet; and yet as I write the words, "I select," I am
full of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay.
Once, twenty years ago, I seemed to awake from sleep to find my body
rigid, and to hear a strange voice speaking these words through my lips as
through lips of stone: "We make an image of him who sleeps, and it is not
him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel."

XXII

As I go up and down my stair and pass the gilded Moorish wedding-chest
where I keep my "barbarous words," I wonder will I take to them once more,
for I am baffled by those voices that still speak as to Odysseus but as
the bats; or now that I shall in a little be growing old, to some kind of
simple piety like that of an old woman.

_May_ 9, 1917.

EPILOGUE

MY DEAR "MAURICE"--I was often in France before you were born or when you
were but a little child. When I went for the first or second time Mallarme
had just written: "All our age is full of the trembling of the veil of the
temple." One met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic. A
distinguished English man of letters asked me to call with him on
Stanislas de Gaeta because he did not dare go alone to that mysterious
house. I met from time to time with the German poet Doukenday, a grave
Swede whom I only discovered after years to have been Strindberg, then
looking for the philosopher's stone in a lodging near the Luxembourg; and
one day in the chambers of Stuart Merrill the poet, I spoke with a young
Arabic scholar who displayed a large, roughly-made gold ring which had
grown to the shape of his finger. Its gold had no hardening alloy, he
said, because it was made by his master, a Jewish Rabbi, of alchemical
gold. My critical mind--was it friend or enemy?--mocked, and yet I was
delighted. Paris was as legendary as Connaught. This new pride, that of
the adept, was added to the pride of the artist. Villiers de L'Isle Adam,
the haughtiest of men, had but lately died. I had read his _Axel_ slowly
and laboriously as one reads a sacred book--my French was very bad--and
had applauded it upon the stage. As I could not follow the spoken words, I
was not bored even where Axel and the Commander discussed philosophy for a
half