half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were
forgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the
tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will,
everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise
through numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, in
some way more certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternal
moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of
rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids.
And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they
had almost ceased to be, and, having endured strange moods,
melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passed
into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness
which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had
ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and
I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen
from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and
become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through a
night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant
wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the
wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to find myself
leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I saw
the _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant corner it
had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting. 'I will
go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for I
have been with eternal things.' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need
answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must
come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple
between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of
men.'