I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even those
paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at
other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion
about a nymph of the Illissus, “The common opinion is enough for me.” I
believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we
cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some
wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever
seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant
and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood
without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or
something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And
now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with
almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.
You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever
your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the
Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty
believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers
imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some
vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway
out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be
beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and
fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport
than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among
green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of
argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we
who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple
of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even
spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as I
think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our
natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall
unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among
blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but
Foreshadowings mingled with the images
Of man’s misdeeds in greater days than these,
as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good
spirits.
1902