mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary association into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy would be wholly pagan, for it was plain that its symbols must be selected from all those things that had moved men most during many, mainly Christian, centuries.
I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it The Rose, because of the Rose's double meaning; of an old fisherman with "never a crack in his heart"; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the young, or of some cheerful fiddler, and all those things that "popular poets" write of, but that I must some day, on that day when the gates began to open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm that still echoed Morris I prayed to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty:
"Come near, come near, come near—ah, leave me still
A little space for the Rose-breath to fill,
Lest I no more hear common things. . . .
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chant a tongue men do not know."
I do not remember what I meant by "the bright hearts," but a little later I wrote of Spirits "with mirrors in their hearts."
My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by that method Macgregor had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are warned against in those "Oracles" which antiquity has attributed to Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet. "Stoop not down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images."
XV
I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty-three or fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single fortnight's voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood. He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and knew nothing of Irish litera-
