I have now described that belief in magic which has set me all but
unwilling among those lean and fierce minds who are at war with their
time, who cannot accept the days as they pass, simply and gladly; and I
look at what I have written with some alarm, for I have told more of the
ancient secret than many among my fellow-students think it right to tell.
I have come to believe so many strange things because of experience, that
I see little reason to doubt the truth of many things that are beyond my
experience; and it may be that there are beings who watch over that
ancient secret, as all tradition affirms, and resent, and perhaps avenge,
too fluent speech. They say in the Aran Islands that if you speak overmuch
of the things of Faery your tongue becomes like a stone, and it seems to
me, though doubtless naturalistic reason would call it Auto-suggestion or
the like, that I have often felt my tongue become just so heavy and
clumsy. More than once, too, as I wrote this very essay I have become
uneasy, and have torn up some paragraph, not for any literary reason, but
because some incident or some symbol that would perhaps have meant nothing
to the reader, seemed, I know not why, to belong to hidden things. Yet I
must write or be of no account to any cause, good or evil; I must commit
what merchandise of wisdom I have to this ship of written speech, and
after all, I have many a time watched it put out to sea with not less
alarm when all the speech was rhyme. We who write, we who bear witness,
must often hear our hearts cry out against us, complaining because of
their hidden things, and I know not but he who speaks of wisdom may not
sometimes in the change that is coming upon the world, have to fear the
anger of the people of Faery, whose country is the heart of the
world--'The Land of the Living Heart.' Who can keep always to the little
pathway between speech and silence, where one meets none but discreet
revelations? And surely, at whatever risk, we must cry out that
imagination is always seeking to remake the world according to the
impulses and the patterns in that great Mind, and that great Memory? Can
there be anything so important as to cry out that what we call romance,
poetry, intellectual beauty, is the only signal that the supreme
Enchanter, or some one in His councils, is speaking of what has been, and
shall be again, in the consummation of time?
1901.