Rosa Alchemica | Page 2

of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though
they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they
seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty
as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that
it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a
thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate
sorrow. All those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturous faces
singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities with their passionless dignity, those
wild shapes rushing from despair to despair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no
part; and every experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite,
would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never know, and even in my
most perfect moment I would be two selves, the one watching with heavy eyes the other's
moment of content. I had heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but
the supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart into a weariless
spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had been from him also. I turned to my last
purchase, a set of alchemical apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had
assured me, once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the alembic to the athanor
and laid the lavacrum maris at their side, I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all
beings, divided from the great deep where spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, are
weary; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the consuming thirst
for destruction which made the alchemist veil under his symbols of lions and dragons, of
eagles and ravens, of dew and of nitre, a search for an essence which would dissolve all
mortal things. I repeated to myself the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in which he
compares the fire of the last day to the fire of the alchemist, and the world to the
alchemist's furnace, and would have us know that all must be dissolved before the divine
substance, material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dissolved indeed the mortal
world and lived amid immortal essences, but had obtained no miraculous ecstasy. As I
thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it
seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the
furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold,
weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect
labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters
in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone
uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.

II
My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered the more at this
because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants do all things silently, lest they broke
the dream of my inner life. Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself,
and, taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to descend the
stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the sound poured through every corner
and crevice of the house there was no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because
my needs were so few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as they

would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence of a world from
which I had driven everything but dreams suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as
I drew the bolt. I found before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and
whose wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes, made him
look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, something between a debauchee, a
saint, and a peasant. He had recently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a
matter of importance: indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for me. His
voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and remembering the magnetic
power ne had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled with much annoyance at this
irrelevant intrusion, as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking
and railing, and Curran telling stories