Part 19

To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many roses, and looking westward across a waveless, a moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and fainter mauve lost in a vast luminous space of milky, violet-shadowed translucency, I dream again that old dream, and wonder what its portent then, what its ancient significance, of what the symbol now, the eternal and unchanging symbol. For nothing is more strange than the life of natural symbols. We may discern in them a new illusion, a new meaning: the thought we slip into them may be shaped to a new desire and coloured with some new fantasy of dreams or of the unspoken and nameless longing in the heart: but the symbol has seen a multitude of desires come and go like shadows, has been troubled with many longings and baffled wings of the veiled passions of the soul, and has known dreams, many dreams, dreams as the uncounted sand, the myriad wave, the illimitable host of cloud, rain that none hath numbered. The Symbol of the Lily has been the chalice of the world’s tears; the symbol of the Rose, the passion of uplifted hearts and of hearts on fire; in the symbol of the Cross has dwelled, like fragrance in a flower, the human Soul. The salt, mutable, and yet unchanging sea has been the phantom in which empires have seen Time like a shadow, the mirage by which kings have wept and nations been amorous in a great pride. The Wind, that no man has seen, on whose rushing mane no hand has been laid, and in whose mouth has been set no bridle since the world swung out of chaos on chariots of flame, ... has not that solitary and dread creature of the deeps been fashioned in our minds to an image of the Everlasting, and in our hearts been shaped to the semblance of a Spirit?

A rose, laid on a stone-altar in the sunfire, and thrown into the sea, with strange hymns, with supplication ... what a symbol this of the desires that do not die with nations, the longings that outlive peoples, the grass of prayer that Time has trampled upon and left and forever leaves green and virginal?

To give that, that lovely fragrant flame of the old material earth, to the altars of the bowed spirit: to clothe it in the fire of heaven: to commit it to the unassuaged thirst of the everlasting graves of the sea.--Surely, here, an image of that Rosa Mundi which has been set upon the forehead of the world since time was, that Rose of Beauty, that Rose of Time, that Rose of the world which the passion of the soul has created as a prayer to the Inscrutable: the Rose of the Soul, of you, of me, of all that have been, of all that are, of all unborn, that we lay upon our places of prayer, and offer to the Secret Fires, and commit to desolation, and sorrow, and the salt and avid hunger of Death? What came of that mystical wedding, of the world we know and the world we do not know, by that rose of the spirit, committed thus in so great a hope, so great a faith? The Druid is not here to tell. Faith after Faith has withered like a leaf. But still we stand by ancestral altars, still offer the Rose of our Desire to the veiled Mystery, still commit this our symbol to the fathomless, the everlasting, the unanswering Deep.

THE STAR OF REST

A FRAGMENT

_REST_--what an OCEANIC word! I have been thinking of this unfathomable, unpenetrable word with mingled longing, and wonder, and even awe.

What depths are in it, what infinite spaces, what vast compassionate sky, what tenderness of oblivion, what husht awakenings, what quiet sinkings and fadings into peace.

Waking early, I took the word as one might take a carrier-dove and loosed it into the cloudy suspense of the stilled mind--and it rose again and again in symbolic cloud-thought, now as an infinite green forest murmurous with a hidden wind, now in some other guise and once as Ecstasy herself, listening.

_Dear soft, sweet breath of the hills, Good-night!_

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

SOME PRESS NOTICES

“Not beauty alone, but that element of strangeness in beauty which Mr. Pater rightly discerned as the inmost spirit of romantic art--it is this which gives to Miss Macleod’s work its peculiar æsthetic charm.”--_Mr. Ashcroft Noble._

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“Miss Macleod is a poet. Her prose _is_ prose--it is a poet’s prose.... She excels in the very quality most Celtic literature so signally wants--namely, _form_.... But more than a sense of form is evident in her stories. She has the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the attentive spirit, the brooding mind. She has caught and construed into sweet words all the magical beauty of the themes, nor has she shrunk from their horror; and in almost all one is conscious of that unknown something that ‘moves in the shadow of life.’ ‘It is Destiny,’ she tells us, ‘that is the Protagonist in the Celtic drama.’”--_To-day._

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“Miss Macleod’s genius has long been recognised as representing most completely the revival of the Celtic spirit in modern English literature.”--_The Manchester Guardian._

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“Miss Macleod is a Celt of the Celts; her theme is the ancient trouble of her race.... She appeals to a little clan of her own, to whom the wild bees of the spirit come, as secret wings in the dark, with the sound and breath of forgotten things. To that clan _The Winged Destiny_ will be more than welcome. It shows in abundance all the writer’s usual qualities of charm and manner.... Criticism bends before the magic glamour of the north, where the sea foam is white and the skies are dark with cloud and wind. The land of the Gael is something rare and apart; and rare and apart, judge it as you will, is the art of Fiona Macleod.”--_The Glasgow Herald._

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“What I admire in the work of Miss Fiona Macleod is her infinite sympathy for all that is beautiful, either in what we usually call inanimate nature, or in the deeds and words of men. She too--and this is no mean compliment--respects her own gift, and bestows it royally.”--_Country Life._

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“‘There is no mystery in them, or anywhere, except the eternal mystery of beauty’--and Miss Macleod certainly possesses the master key to the heart of that mystery.”--_The Daily Chronicle._

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“Miss Macleod persuades one more than ever that she is the possessor of that rare and precious thing, genius.... Her work has energy, passion, beauty, and sweetness.”--_The National Observer._

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“‘J’avais le sentiment de l’infini et de l’éternel et de là mes sourires pour les choses qui passent. Mais l’Esprit ne passe point.’ Cette belle phrase de Renan s’applique assez exactment à l’auteur de _The Winged Destiny_, Miss Fiona Macleod. Ce livre qui s’est ‘dressé comme un fantôme hors des bois hautés’ a le charme indicible des précédents œuvres de cet auteur. Miss Macleod a quelque chose de visionnaire et d’indéfini, d’étrangement mélancolique, de profondément émouvant.... Tout cela, c’est bien ‘le rêve de la vie vue en beauté,’ et voir les choses dans leur beauté c’est les voir dans leur vérité, comme l’a dit Matthew Arnold.”--_Le Mercure de France._

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation errors have been fixed.

A couple of instances of repeated words have been fixed.

Page 58: “dear and familar to us” changed to “dear and familiar to us”

Page 225: “French poet or romancist” changed to “French poet or romanticist”

Page 344: “to enchance its beauty” changed to “to enhance its beauty”