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THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 BEQUEST 
 OF 
 
 Professor 
 Howard Moise 
 
SIRENICA 
 
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 Pindar, Pythian, iii. 20. 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 BY W. COMPTON LEITH 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 WILLIAM MARION REEDY 
 
 Portland Maine : Printed for Thomas Bird Mosher 
 
 and published by him at 45 Exchange Street 
 
 MDCCCCXV 
 
THE IVORY GATE 
 
 Sunt geminae Somni portae : quarum altera fertur 
 Cornea; qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris: 
 Altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto ; 
 Sed falsa ad coelum mittunt insomnia Manes. 
 
 VIRGIL. 
 
 TJZHEN, loved by poet and painter 
 
 The sunrise fills the sky, 
 When night's gold urns grow fainter, 
 
 And in depths of amber die — 
 When the morn-breeze stirs the curtain, 
 
 Bearing an odorous freight — 
 Then visions strange, uncertain, 
 Pour thick through the Ivory Gate. 
 
THE IVORY GATE 
 
 // 
 
 Then the oars of Ithaca dip so 
 
 Silently into the sea, 
 That they wake not sad Calypso — 
 
 And the Hero wanders free : 
 He breasts the ocean-furrows, 
 
 At war with the words of Fate- 
 And the blue tide's low susurrus 
 
 Comes up to the Ivory Gate. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Or, clad in the hide of leopard, 
 
 'Mid Ida' s freshest dews, 
 Paris, the Teucrian shepherd, 
 
 His sweet CEnone woos : 
 On the thought of her coming bridal 
 
 Unuttered joy doth wait — 
 While the tune of the false one's idyl 
 
 Rings soft through the Ivory Gate. 
 
THE IVORY GATE 
 
 IV 
 
 Or down from green Helvellyn 
 
 The roar of streams I hear, 
 And the lazy sail is swelling 
 
 To the winds of Windermere : 
 That girl with the rustic bodice 
 
 'Mid the ferry's laughing freight 
 Is as fair as any goddess 
 
 Who sweeps through the Ivory Gate. 
 
 Ah, the vision of dawn is leisure — 
 
 But the truth of day is toil : 
 And we pass from dreams of pleasure 
 
 To the world's unstayed turmoil. 
 Perchance, beyond the river 
 
 Which guards the realms of Fate, 
 Our spirits may dwell for ever 
 
 'Mong dreams of the Ivory Gate. 
 
 MORTIMER COLLINS. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 £^-| f"^^ HIS is the book of everybody — 
 this " Sirenica." Some of the self- 
 imagined elect may think it is for 
 them alone. They are wrong, 
 thank God. For here, in this volume of stately, 
 sonorous, rhythmic, colorful prose is the 
 explanation of each man to himself. He knows 
 that he is at war with himself, he grieves at 
 or girds at some unsootheable discontent. This 
 book tells him that he is the battle-field of a 
 Holy War, that his discontent is divine. 
 
 For that song the Sirens sang is ringing in 
 every human heart. It is a song of insup- 
 pressible yearning over and of protest against 
 all boundaries. It is a song against the law 
 of moderation, against askesis. From " beyond 
 the flaming ramparts of the world " it comes, 
 and from the Abyss. It summons to the 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 heights and to the depths with a melody of 
 ineluctable allure. Most are too faint to arise 
 and follow but they listen in secret. Others 
 answer the call and go to glory or to doom. 
 Its music is a madness or a great sanity. It 
 makes the genius or the crank. 
 
 For their own ends sacerdotalists have main- 
 tained the Sirens* song is a myth of fleshly 
 lust. They lie. The song goes on singing 
 when fleshly lust is done. How else should 
 it have moved durus Ulixes newly escaped 
 from Circe's spell ? No : the call is more 
 than that ; it is a call away from the tyranny 
 of reason, the superstition of order, the idolatry 
 of law, the satisfaction of the here and now. 
 Verily it is one with the voice of Pan. 
 
 The Sirens are those who voice to us the 
 eternal appeal of Romance. They bid us 
 " over the hills and far away." They chant 
 the " Marsellaise " of an eternally unconquer- 
 able Revolution. They give the marching 
 tune for every uprising against the archons of 
 art, religion, philosophy, science, government. 
 To its strain go forth ever and forever the world- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 shapers, the world-forsakers, the explorers of 
 the vast inane, the adventurers in every realm 
 of thought and action. Some come back with 
 splendid spoil of their wild essay ; others are 
 lost in defeat. Within man's soul and without, 
 in all far, deep, forbidden places they range 
 upon their quest. They seek the unknowable. 
 They would express the inexpressible. In 
 their hearts are the restlessness of the sea, 
 the hues of dawns and sunsets, the music of 
 the spheres, the appeal of the eyes of birds 
 and beasts. They would measure the measure- 
 less. They seek the end — rest. Rest in the 
 accomplishment of all knowledge, the righting 
 of all wrong — the rest in perfection. 
 
 For no man is content within life's limita- 
 tions — no one. Each man looks upon the 
 best he knows and scorns it to seek the 
 imagined better thing. Into his work he puts 
 as much as possible of that desired imagined 
 better thing. He is fullest awake when he is 
 most possessed by that dream of the beyond. 
 His best expression of himself is in escape 
 from himself. When clearest he hears the 
 
XIV 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Sirens' song he is lost in ecstacy as he visions 
 an end, which endlessly moves on. He may 
 be a discoverer in science, a founder of a new 
 creed, a poet, a reformer, a stormer of all the 
 impregnable mysteries. He may be an humble 
 toiler at life's daily tasks. He would be 
 nothing and do nothing but for his outreach 
 somehow to the unattainable. Every man 
 dreams his dream of a better world than he 
 knows. It is a dream of some form of con- 
 tentment not to be known here. And as all 
 laws, cults, institutions are framed to forbid 
 his seeking further than what the fathers have 
 told us, every man is an anarchist as to some 
 or many forms taken by authority. If this 
 were not true, life would stagnate, progress 
 would cease. 
 
 It is Romance that keeps the world alive 
 and going. It is Romance that perpetually 
 refreshes the springs of art. As imagination 
 Romance opens up new worlds, new universes 
 to science. In politics it is the Romanticists 
 who strike out new enlargements of liberty. 
 In philosophy the Romanticists eternally pre- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 vail because life will not be confined in a 
 system. The wonder of the world, its ever 
 unfolding magic and mystery, the limitlessness 
 of the possibilities of the human spirit working 
 on all the materialities of environment, — this 
 is the Romance which no glacial age of the 
 Classic can ever chill into the peace of death. 
 And wonder seeks the source of Beauty and 
 of Truth. The Sirens' song is the mighty 
 invitation to the quest, and to its key every 
 spirit is attuned subtly, responding in harmonic 
 vibrations however faint or strong. 
 
 So I read " Sirenica " and put but palely its 
 message of verbal splendor. For its language 
 is of a multitudinous music. It is a book of 
 symphonies and pictures. It is all a flowing 
 stream of tints and tones of the scales of sound 
 and color. Upon its bosom floats every flower 
 of perfect speech. Innumerable allusions, 
 nuances of literary echo, brave, translunary 
 soarings of imagination, the spoil of a life of 
 reading of the best that has been said or writ- 
 ten — all these are blended into a style that 
 has the lull of the lotus which evokes in the 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 reader, vision. You do not, under the spell, 
 so much follow the argument of a thesis as 
 suffer a translation into a condition of clair- 
 voyance and clairaudience wherein are seen 
 and heard in the far outer spaces the vanished 
 idealists of all time, or victors or vanquished, 
 choiring with the Sirens the song of worship 
 around an inviolable shrine which holds the 
 sacred bread, unattainable forever, to still the 
 hunger of the human heart. 
 
 WILLIAM MARION REEDY 
 
SIRENICA 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 i 
 
 WHEN the Emperor Tibe- 
 rius inquired of the gram- 
 marian what songs the 
 Sirens sang, he asked to 
 prove his wit and was gratified when no man 
 answered. Yet there may have been those 
 present at his audience who, questioned in the 
 same way, had not pretended ignorance, but 
 dared to hazard their wide solution. For the 
 song is immortal; the times have been rare 
 throughout the ages in which it has been inter- 
 mitted, and they were yet beyond experience 
 in the days of the second Caesar. The Sirens 
 might have been heard then, as they may now 
 be heard ; while the Emperor spoke, many a 
 Roman stood fast in their toils, as in our 
 midst at this hour their victims are a great 
 
 "What 
 
 song the 
 
 Sirens 
 
 sang." 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 "What 
 
 song the 
 
 Sirens 
 
 sang." 
 
 multitude. The Sirens are no more dead than 
 Pan, though, like him, they have sometimes 
 rested from their work when the winds have 
 blown furiously, and the sails left the sea, and 
 the ploughs lain rusting. When the world 
 has grown barbarous or too violent for their 
 music, they have withdrawn awhile into the 
 recesses of their sea-caverns, as he into the 
 unvisited clefts of mountains; but they have 
 never renounced their art, or wholly aban- 
 doned their assigned part in human tragedy ; 
 they are still the fair-speaking handmaidens 
 of Fate, who may never release them from her 
 service. Nor have they ever been overcome 
 by gods or men ; it is not true that they flung 
 themselves into the sea in despite, or that 
 they were changed into mute rocks because 
 a single adventurer went safely by them ; it is 
 not true that the Muses silenced them for all 
 time by the chance of a single victory. They 
 live on, careless of these tales. They still 
 sing their ancient melody, nor is there any 
 fear but that the music which survived the 
 Roman Empire will outlast our governments, 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 audible in a new time beyond the prospect of 
 our chronology. And if our life were less 
 confused by the sounding tides of action, in 
 its clamour unpropitious to the fine attention 
 of the soul, we might more often hear to our 
 peril such words as those which made the 
 hero Odysseus fear. For we stand upon a 
 greater height of years than those who have 
 lived before us; were there more lulls and 
 pauses in the rumour of the world, we might 
 catch echoes out of a vaster distance, and 
 know a wider trouble than they. 
 
 A prince, long ages ago, discovered the 
 tenour of the song; but being a god's off- 
 spring, he was saved by a miracle from the 
 fated consequence, and lived to understand 
 the averted danger. He it was who first con- 
 cealed the truth, fearing for the people's 
 happiness ; it was from him that all later 
 rulers learned to defame the singers, in order 
 that men, deeming them too base for more 
 than the lower love or fear, might give small 
 heed, and be held more readily out of earshot. 
 He set them down as professed temptresses ; 
 
 "What 
 
 song the 
 
 Sirens 
 
 sang." 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Odysseus. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Odysseus. 
 
 their names were made a byword for that 
 which of all frailties was most incongruous 
 with their nature. Their song, it was said, 
 was but a common lure for mariners, the music 
 of concupiscence, the voice of the strange 
 woman wilful in the love of evil. And one 
 age taking up the cry from the other, this old 
 injustice came down the centuries and was at 
 last established almost beyond power of revo- 
 cation. It was made legendary, and legend 
 outlives truth ; the world has a deep love for 
 its old traditions, and often the falsest are the 
 most faithfully defended. The mischief began 
 with the tales of Argonauts and heroes sailing 
 back from Troy, tales so ancient and so far- 
 repeated that the names which they once 
 discredited never lost the stain. Century 
 after century, the Sirens were re-condemned 
 as idle daughters of music ; long repetition 
 caused the unbelievable thing to be believed 
 as an article of unquestioned faith. This was 
 a natural simplicity in the darker ages ; it is 
 preposterous in our own. For what but 
 inveterate blind habit should make us hold so 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 long that demi-goddesses and rivals of the 
 Muses had nothing more to sing than long- 
 shore ballads or chants for sailors' ears ? 
 Who may in his heart suppose that against 
 such lures as this Odysseus stood defenceless, 
 the hero of a life more various in experience 
 than any lived upon the earth before his day ? 
 Who, once reflecting upon the absurd belief, 
 shall accept the story that such a man dared 
 not trust his soul — his mighty soul — within 
 the range of a cheap seduction, or that his 
 limbs — his mighty limbs — trembled beneath 
 him at a sound, and were relaxed by a com- 
 mon blandishment? It is to ask too much; 
 it is to overstrain credulity. What charm had 
 lust or indolence for one sated betimes with 
 the delicate arts of Circe ? From a surfeit of 
 the easier pleasures he was but newly fled ; 
 he had drunk the dregs of that cup, and in 
 contrition gnawed the shards of it. And 
 now, when at last he was away upon the main, 
 breathing a large air as the sail drew full, and 
 the keel hissed like a share through the long 
 sea-furrows, should he now stay for a languid 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Odysseus. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Odysseus. 
 
 music, now re-invoke that debasing servitude ? 
 His prow was towards Ithaca ; night after 
 night as he leaned upon the steering-oar and 
 laid his course for home, it was no amorous 
 vision that he saw, but the white walls of his 
 father's house, and the brows of Penelope 
 lightened from the burden of untaken Troy. 
 At such a time of all others in his life, you are 
 to suppose the old lures once more succeed- 
 ing, the old cup, so over-honeyed and staled 
 upon the sense, more potent than in volup- 
 tuous hours. For such rewards as these you 
 are to think the wisest hero who followed 
 Agamemnon to war must so misdoubt his 
 strength that he dare not trust his resolved 
 will as they passed the perilous shore, but the 
 crew must lash him to the mast lest he plunge 
 from the home-bound ship to blunder upon a 
 young man's ruin. This, surely, is a mad tale, 
 and for no serious acceptance. Whatever else 
 be charged against Odysseus, this at least 
 shall never be believed. That he is wronged 
 even in the Homeric song is suggested by 
 another legend. When Argo sailed by the 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 Sirens' coast, and, high on the poop, Orpheus 
 drowned their music with his own, there rowed 
 among the crew one Butes, priest of Athena, 
 goddess, let it be recalled, of wisdom and 
 passionless restraint. Yet the story goes that 
 it was this man and none other of the Argo- 
 nauts who yielded to the melody, and diving 
 into the sea, swam shorewards without a 
 thought for past repute or immediate danger. 
 Then, strange to tell, Athena let him swim to 
 his doom ; but Aphrodite interferred, and bore 
 him off to Lilybaeum. Now, if the Sirens 
 were such as common opinion held them, why 
 was it that the priest of the maiden goddess 
 was first to yield ? And why should Aphrodite 
 save him, who, if there were any truth in 
 rumour, should rather have wafted him to 
 land, exulting in his discomfiture ? Is it not 
 plain that the Sirens were in truth no 
 votaresses of hers, and that their allurements 
 were so little after her heart that she was at 
 exceeding pains to thwart them ? Moreover, 
 a third story tells that the Sirens were virginal 
 of inclination, and, since this quality was 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Odysseus. 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Romance. 
 
 judged a fault in them, were punished by 
 being stripped of their wings. 
 
 It is clear, then, that the epic itself is unjust 
 to the Sirens and to him who was appointed 
 to hear out their song. It brought them alike 
 down to the baseness of common and weak 
 mortals, whereas they were of a nobler cast, 
 the men heroic, the singers half divine. If 
 the music was indeed perilous for the hero's 
 understanding, it must have sounded some 
 other note of danger, a note grave and exalted, 
 befitting one of so high an ancestry. For 
 Odysseus was of the race of Sisyphus ; in his 
 veins flowed the blood of the Attempter who 
 might never fulfil. What voice, then, should 
 speak with irresistible appeal to the scion of 
 such a stock, to one versed so deeply in the 
 world? Should it be any idle melody you 
 will, a soft enticement, a sensual promise? 
 Or should it rather be a call to knowledge 
 wider and ever again more wide, the reaching 
 out of the soul after things beyond all past 
 essay ? None shall doubt the answer who 
 remember that fated lineage ; it was a call 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 not to ease or vain delights, but to the unde- 
 sisting infinite adventure. This and this only 
 could have made Odysseus fear in the fair 
 hour of his return, this only could have 
 brought him to endure the cords upon his 
 limbs ; this alone was so hard to disobey that 
 he might not trust himself to stand unbound 
 when it sounded over the waters in the hot 
 Apulian noon. In the soul of Laertes' son 
 there was but one place vulnerable, and that 
 the voice of the Sirens found, for the very 
 cause that they sang no voluptuous song but 
 a chant of battle, the high music of sedition 
 which lifts up the heart, which takes the savour 
 from the thing which is here and now, and 
 the peace from tame contentment. It was 
 that music at whose first note the soul is 
 roused against the prescribed and sanctioned, 
 impatient of the ordered life and the arranged 
 happiness, mutinous against the care which 
 would shield grown men from peril of man- 
 hood. It was the music which awakens to a 
 glory of arduous dreams. It was the signal 
 which suddenly disgusts the soul with the 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Romance. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Romance. 
 
 thing which is all feasible or wholly under- 
 stood, the summons which calls away from 
 the possessed and measurable land into the 
 uncharted kingdom of the Vague. For the 
 Sirens mean Romance. They awaken that 
 restive yearning within the heart which practi- 
 cal wisdom strives to quell. They disenchant 
 from the governable life with its gregarious 
 ease and communicable satisfactions. They 
 stand against the dictated sentiment and the 
 admiration ruled by norm ; they mock at hap- 
 piness, the reward of all these things. But 
 they incite to the sole adventure ; they promise 
 a reward remote from the smiling continent of 
 pleasures, isled in pain, attained and lost 
 alone. They promise joy, the stress and 
 puissance, which carries the soul out to the 
 great verges and holds her a-swoon in ecstasies 
 of incredible life. When their song sounds, 
 the chase is up after the quarry which is not 
 overtaken, and all who follow come again 
 changed men. They have bestridden wild 
 steeds and will lead sumpter-mules no longer ; 
 they will go absorbed and expectant hence- 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 i3 
 
 forth, seeking nothing but the return of the 
 sign. They will refrain from fellowship, for 
 it impedes ; garment frays with garment, but 
 not soul with soul. What profit has any State 
 of these, who give no thanks for its benefits 
 and have no regard for its laws ; who dwell in 
 the safe walls and dream perverse of some 
 Mount in Araby ; who eat of the joy-leaf and 
 see all things transformed before them, trans- 
 formed themselves and witched away from 
 kinship ; who in the throng of near affections 
 care only for the love which is far ? What 
 loyal service shall the ruler hope of these, 
 who live only for the day of issue beyond his 
 marches, wild beings, starting away under the 
 hand of kindness ? These are unprofitable 
 souls upon every scale of his estimation, lives 
 unexpressed, instruments unplayed, symbols 
 undeciphered. Shall he force these into his 
 fold ? Stay the sparks of the blown fire ; 
 bind the flakes of the frozen snow. 
 
 What things, then, were the Sirens wont to 
 sing, when the ship passed with glistening 
 oars, and the ear of a hero was open to the 
 
 The Sirens 
 
 and 
 Romance. 
 
 The song 
 of the 
 Sirens. 
 
14 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The song 
 of the 
 Sirens. 
 
 song? Things fathomless, things aestuant; 
 things lost in the vast perplexities of light. 
 They sang the splendid wells of colour, that 
 tremble and change in their deeps, the blue at 
 the heart of great sapphires, the crimson in 
 the poppy's cup at twilight, the wine of lonely 
 isles. They praised the tongue of the beacons 
 lapping at the darkness, as the lit pines of 
 Ida above Troy fallen, the path of the moon 
 over the sea, and the world's end, and the 
 voids beyond the world. They sang of the 
 unascended heights, of mountains indignant 
 of tamed life from the beginning of remem- 
 brance, of the beauty of lithe beasts that range 
 free over the earth, the fawn bounding above 
 the thicket, the panther instant upon the prey. 
 Of the eagle in the height they sang, and the 
 rhythm of wings in the suave air; of divine 
 unguarded spaces and the pure zones of star- 
 light. Their song was also of tumultuous 
 things, of the tempests sounding in the gorges, 
 and of the wind upon the neck of the moan- 
 ing forest. Then, fierce for men's deliverance, 
 they praised the impassioned life, the forth- 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 !5 
 
 going of the wild will on its course, the tracts 
 of infinity overgone. In quick notes of chal- 
 lenge, or lingering notes of tenderness, they 
 awakened yearnings vast as a god's desire. 
 They sang of slaveries redeemed, and brave 
 revolts, and fate confronted in the high splen- 
 dour of disdain. They sang of all that is 
 above fulfilment and beyond clear vision ; of 
 the immeasurable, the uncontained, the half- 
 imagined ; of that which is touched but never 
 held, implored but unpossessed ; of things 
 supreme and speeding in the vanward of time. 
 Then they sang the vileness of all who live 
 contented upon an alms, and are at ease in 
 bonds, the slaves whose servitude is made 
 sweet by habit. They sang of dulled wits 
 cheated of their birthright, of fancies wilfully 
 pent, while the clouds race free under the 
 moon or are flung upon the red pyre when the 
 evening ends the rain. On the grey life they 
 chanted scorn, with its rounded tasks, its 
 hopes too soon fordone, its unresisted nonage. 
 With a rising fury of contempt they mocked 
 the mind of dulcet thoughts ; the spirit 
 
 The song 
 of the 
 Sirens. 
 
i6 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The song 
 of the 
 Sirens. 
 
 engrossed in mean things weighed and par- 
 celled ; they spurned its thin sobrieties, its 
 misdevotions, its lust after the little scantlings 
 of achievement. As the gadfly goaded Io, so 
 they stung the slave of usage over the lands 
 and fords of dream ; they mocked him as he 
 stumbled with eyes bent earthward, blind as 
 the animals that graze bestial years away. 
 They flouted him in his self-complacence with 
 taunts intolerable upon the lips of women, 
 and words like scorching fire. Whatsoever is 
 of ease or acquiescence ; whatsoever imprisons 
 the soul within the walls of swept and tended 
 places; whatsoever hinders, or fences, or 
 impounds the life created for emprise — all 
 this they held to shame in a glow of scorn, 
 lambent over it as the midnight lightning 
 above the farmstead. And then they mocked 
 the hero Odysseus hastening home like a 
 hungry ploughman from the fields, or a fisher 
 from beneath the headland, tired by the 
 labours of a day, while the marvellous world 
 lay yet unknown before him, and the immeas- 
 urable Ocean, and the promise of the Fortunate 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 *1 
 
 Isles. They made him small in his own 
 sight ; they proved him base and fallen ; they 
 foretold to him in his grey hairs, if he refused 
 them now, compunctions beyond mortal suf- 
 fering and the besieging terrors of remorse. 
 And at the last, wild with the passion of 
 transcendent things and the hatred of all the 
 bounds that infringe upon the soul, they grew 
 contemptuous of the very gods, who at ease 
 upon Olympus, forgot the dream of greater 
 heights, and the menace of the unslumbering 
 Titan, worthier than they of heaven. 
 
 The song 
 of the 
 Sirens. 
 
 II 
 
 Such was the music of the Sirens in the 
 youth of the world, and so it still sounds, in 
 new languages and under new heavens, seduc- 
 ing from content in the still noons of happiness 
 to the love of flaring dawns and tremendous 
 majesties of evening ; leading astray, but along 
 the mountains ; darkening life, but with 
 immortal shadows. It never wrought man 
 contemptible wrong ; but it encircles him with 
 fatal toils and brings him hourly into peril. 
 
 The 
 
 answer 
 
 of the 
 
 Greeks. 
 
i8 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 The 
 
 answer 
 of the 
 Greeks. 
 
 Of all who in all ages have sought to avert the 
 insidious danger, the rulers of the Athenians 
 had clearest vision of its scope and compass. 
 They showed the one imperfect way of safety 
 free to men, the measured classic way which 
 alone in part avoids the malady of unrest. 
 Many and great services they rendered men, 
 but of all these their war with the Sirens is 
 the highest. It is their other Persian war, 
 unchronicled, unsung, yet no less momentous 
 to the afterworld than the legendary struggle 
 with the Great King. How mighty are those 
 Sirens whom even Hellas could not conquer ; 
 how great was the soul of Hellas, though she 
 might never quite prevail ! For Athens erred 
 by very excess of brilliance ; she would discuss 
 no terms and make no composition, though in 
 compromise lay the one chance of a happy 
 issue. She dreamed in her pride that she 
 might wholly crush an immortal enemy; as 
 well might she have sought to ostracise the 
 winds of heaven. She fought with a fine 
 valiance, and refused no challenge. But she 
 fell into many an ambush which a slower wit 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 *9 
 
 would have escaped; where the Boeotian 
 would have drawn a battle the Athenian lost 
 it. At last she wearied ; and with exhaustion 
 grew intolerance. All must accept her law of 
 measure : to the barathron with the uncon- 
 forming spirit ; let none speak of the forbidden 
 thing. Away with all that might reveal the 
 Sirens' power. Away with the memory of 
 Odysseus ; or if that name were too dear to 
 be forgotten, let it be defamed and hatefully 
 remembered. Let Sophocles lead on the 
 deceiver of Philoctetes ; let Euripedes pre- 
 sent the devourer of widows' houses ; let 
 there remain to after generations a legend of 
 the hard Hellenic Sadducee, durus Ulixes> 
 "Ulysses wise and base," shameless of all 
 shames to achieve an argument or carry a merci- 
 less design. Exaggerating thus, the nature 
 which was to serve cool reason abjured it; 
 the instrument of measure was taught to serve 
 excess ; and temperance, the most classic of 
 the virtues, was crowded from the classic mind. 
 The world should pursue happiness in sun- 
 light, composed to ordered days in the worship 
 
 The 
 answer 
 of the 
 Greeks. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 answer 
 of the 
 Greeks. 
 
 of the Grace Aglaia. It should create forms 
 of clearest contour; it should abide in a 
 knowledge succinct and fixed in a clean 
 circumference ; man should rule his way by 
 reason only, persuaded to pursue that alone 
 which might be all seen, to handle that 
 alone which might be wholly done. The arch 
 achievement, the absolute sight, these availed, 
 and beyond these nothing. All that was 
 ungoverned and impulsive in his nature 
 should be reprobate as a barbarian violence. 
 Emotion should be the unclean thing; thoughts 
 clouded or suffused with passion no thoughts 
 more, but the draff of idle dreams. Well, it 
 was trenchant war, but fought upon the pure 
 gospel of excess ; the great Greek rule " nothing 
 too much " was belied at every stage of this 
 strategy ; consistency was saved, but the sense 
 of humour sacrificed. For happiness was now 
 defined for Hellenes as "virtuous use of the 
 intellectual energies," and so deep in her 
 loved system was Athens lost, that she heard 
 the chill words as though they fell from 
 Hermes' lips or rustled to her from the oak 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 leaves of Dodona. All passion was cast into 
 one gulf with the banned abstraction Matter, 
 and for the same offence: it interfered with 
 logic ; it blurred the clear lines of geometric 
 fancy. But though her scheme of things was 
 drawn with her finest art, it was yet a world 
 in diagram, as like reality as the dead map to 
 the living landscape. Athens the sane was 
 grown fantastic ; Athens the hardy wrapped 
 herself against the zephyr. She who once 
 went careless in the sun, now set up awnings 
 to keep out starlight. 
 
 The Sirens rejoiced, perceiving her advance 
 along this false way ; the wilfulness of this 
 Amazon spared them terms which her genius 
 had else extorted. Her logic was impossibly 
 consistent for this earth of ours ; it overreached 
 its aim by sheer supereminence ; it lacked the 
 human touch, and could not suffice for men. 
 It was unnatural, and Nature herself arose 
 against it. For in all men there stirs at 
 periods and in mysterious seasons a power 
 intractable to precepts, and primordial in the 
 soul. That power must out, though dialectic 
 
 The 
 
 answer 
 
 of the 
 
 Greeks. 
 
 Ostracis- 
 ing the 
 winds. 
 
22 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 Ostracis- 
 ing the 
 winds. 
 
 go down in the rush of it; who stifles it or 
 denies, though he had taken the Great King 
 by the beard, should surely be humbled for 
 his temerity. For it is not given that it may 
 be disowned, or sundered from thought as a 
 thing of lesser birth. It is twin-born and of 
 the same nobility ; if the right of kinship be 
 denied, it will burst forth alone, an ungovern- 
 able flame, and ill befall him who is found 
 then upon its fiery way. What more ironic 
 stroke has Fate delivered than this, that 
 Athens, preaching reason, should have declined 
 to prejudice ; that the seed which for sterility 
 she had aimed at the ox's horn, should fall 
 beyond the mark and bring forth a hundred- 
 fold to her confusion. But though she was of 
 a finer grain than all who had gone before or 
 after, hers was the common lot of preachers 
 who begin inspired and end indoctrinated ; a 
 bias turns them from the right line ; their best 
 disciples will not follow them. Alas the day 
 when the Greek wrested his own judgment ; 
 when this heaven-sent moderator set himself 
 to out-think thought, alembicating life until 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 23 
 
 the virtue left it. Measure and symmetry and 
 restraint were brought into contempt by his 
 over-favour; pet minions of the mind, they 
 were awarded every prize and their opposites 
 every penalty ; until, like a set paradox of 
 Euclid, the theorem of his ideal life was too 
 absurd for sense. Men wondered ; they grew 
 indignant ; the cleverest and best were drawn 
 insensibly to examine that which was so 
 anxiously abused ; they began to listen for the 
 divine forbidden music. Heretics such as 
 these orthodoxy could not compel. Though 
 she warned and threatened in a sore dis- 
 pleasure, they left the groves and porches for 
 the seashore, where the horizon fades in mist 
 and the harsh contours are all dissolved away. 
 And there in the end the voice of the Sirens 
 came to them, stealing with the faint breeze 
 round the head of Sunium. 
 
 There had always been intellects in Greece 
 which checked at the dogma of full harmony 
 in the world, which could not pay the official 
 price for happiness ; there were always souls to 
 echo that lamentation of Theognis which 
 
 Ostracis- 
 ing the 
 winds. 
 
 Great mal- 
 contents. 
 
24 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Great mal- 
 contents. 
 
 Sophocles renewed, and Posidippus raised 
 again in a later age : " Not to be born is the 
 first boon of man ; and the second, if born he 
 be, to return with all speed thither whence 
 he came." Greek literature has undertones, 
 discovered after what centuries of deafness, 
 which prove that the shadow of the Infinite 
 was not to be averted even from the Greek 
 soul, or the desire of it kept dumb for ever. 
 And since this is the greatest literature that 
 ever was, and vibrant with life, the keenest of 
 all lives that ever ran in veins, its testimony is 
 the word of a faithful witness, and more cred- 
 ible than the cold assurance of the preachers. 
 Philosophers themselves, retained as advocates 
 of the defined and the precise, were found 
 false to their instruction, and blessing that 
 which they were called to curse. Plato in his 
 most prophetic dialogues avows the love of 
 Wisdom a kind of madness, perceiving that 
 without a fusion and kindling of the soul, 
 reason has no way into the heart of truth. 
 He bade philosophy touch the thyrsus, but it 
 did not wound her hand ; nor did it seem to 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 2 5 
 
 many that she had been defiled. Here was 
 no small marvel, but there ensued a greater ; 
 the same confession came from men forearmed 
 against it by yet narrower discipline. It was 
 found on the lips of sculptors, whose art more 
 than all others guards a high convention, and 
 is dedicated from birth to the law of measure. 
 It was found on the lips of Scopas. Now this 
 is so notable a thing, and so eminent a proof 
 of some weakness in the Greek defence, that 
 we may fitly pause over it awhile and question 
 a great shade. In the story of art, there are 
 few deeds more significant than his, who 
 forsook, when it seemed too strait for truth, a 
 tradition accepted almost as divine. It is hard 
 for us now to conceive to the full the courage 
 of the abandonment ; we were never bred up 
 under a Pheidian law ; from our infancy we 
 have inbreathed romance. But then, in the 
 Hellenic world, what audacity in this defec- 
 tion ! Saul among the prophets was not 
 stranger than was this sculptor delivering the 
 message of the Sirens in a world forbidden to 
 speak their names ; it must have seemed to the 
 
 Great mal- 
 contents. 
 
26 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 Great mal- 
 contents. 
 
 lovers of the old law that the foundations of 
 the great art were shaken, and the sacred 
 stream driven backward upon its source. Yet 
 even we may in some faint measure receive 
 the shock of that apostasy, confronted for the 
 first time with a head by Scopas. For it 
 strikes the soul unawares, which looked for no 
 such arrow out of night. The high tranquillity 
 is there, indeed, but pierced through and 
 through ; it is the face of one adventured 
 beyond his last defences, alone in a darkness, 
 ringed about with threatening sounds. Here 
 is the look which the archon's eye would not 
 see, but which the gods saw many a time, 
 when the crowds were gone homeward, and 
 the worshipper lingered in the precinct to 
 question his own soul apart. The countenance 
 of that pondering Medici is not strange to us, 
 as he sits above his tomb lost in the yet 
 insoluble secret ; we know his day, and the 
 mind which created him in a pause of con- 
 verse with sibylline and prophetic forms. 
 Michelangelo perceived — his verse glooms 
 and flashes under the thought — that the desire 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 27 
 
 of things remote, let it once pass into the 
 heart, becomes at once a spring of joy and a 
 fire of never-ceasing torment. All this is 
 written in his own face as his contemporaries 
 have left it, stern, visited by dreams, impatient 
 of this trivial world ; it shines out of eyes 
 worn by long perusals of the heights and 
 depths beyond common sight. But the mind 
 is as it were affronted, when it divines a like 
 foiled and ardent nature in the child of an 
 earlier age, in a Hellene, in one who had 
 dreamed no terrors of the Doom, nor ever 
 trembled in the severe shadows of theology. 
 The expression of such a nature in such an 
 art is unsanctioned by our canons ; it offends 
 as an utterance out of Soli. But in truth this 
 is not so much a lapse as a recovery and a 
 correction. And it is the Sirens' work; these 
 faces speak their language. 
 
 By a peculiar grace of destiny, Scopas was 
 born a Parian ; the child's first steps were 
 upon marble. In such an isle, if anywhere on 
 earth, the young Hellene should have grown 
 up in the very spirit of the harmonious life. 
 
 Great mal- 
 contents. 
 
 Scopas. 
 
28 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 Scopas. 
 
 Roaming the white beaches, or lying upon 
 some promontory above the wine-bright sea, 
 he should have gathered into his soul the 
 consenting gladness of all created things. 
 On such a shore, if the creed of harmony 
 were true, the memory of a bright protected 
 life under the guidance of familiar gods should 
 have remained to him unclouded through his 
 later life as a birthright of happy fortune. 
 Yet just this man was chosen to prove Greece 
 presumptuous, and that by the very art on 
 which she had most relied, the great clear art 
 of Pheidias. That the proof might go out 
 into all the Hellenic world, he was called from 
 his narrow isle ; a new spirit passed into him ; 
 in an unknown hour he was changed, and the 
 manner of his thought transformed. Upon 
 what paths he went, or where the first shadow 
 fell upon him, history does not tell ; his is a 
 life but sparsely chronicled. But from the 
 jetsam and poor wreckage of his work, all that 
 remains now to us from his hand, we may 
 divine what shadows they were, from what 
 deeps issuing, into what heights withdrawn. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 29 
 
 These forms reflect the travail of an unquiet 
 spirit to which the well-preached harmonies 
 were no longer certain. They have lost the 
 poise of godlike life attained in the earlier 
 age; they breathe a disdain of law and a 
 consciousness of high transgression ; they 
 betray an initiation of the soul which orthodox 
 Hellenic art would fain have hidden. They 
 tell of sparkling dangers and serene treacheries 
 perceived, of an undertowing tide upon the 
 bright shores ; and if no poet had ever revealed 
 the secret in anxious verse, these fragments 
 alone would have proclaimed it. Scopas 
 spoke for all those who knew that they bore a 
 burden, and endured no longer to be told by 
 assertive voices that they dreamed, and that 
 their sore shoulders were not galled. For the 
 temple of Athena Alea he wrought the hunt 
 of the Calydonian boar, of which there remain 
 but two mutilated heads, one of an expression 
 tense with such ardour of distress as no mere 
 chase of beasts might ever awaken. He who 
 carved these upturned eyes and parted lips 
 was dreaming of other things than feats of 
 
 Scopas. 
 
3o 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 venery, translating the protest of his own soul 
 and of many souls in like affliction ; while he 
 worked, his fancy was away in the fields of 
 another destiny, where man himself was at 
 bay, and the mort sounded over a human 
 quarry. The broken relief of a charioteer 
 from the tomb of Mausolus, whether the mas- 
 ter himself wrought it or a disciple, speaks in 
 the same language, but in another mood. 
 This driver bending over the chariot-rail is the 
 champion in no battle of which history tells; 
 he is not one who whirls about an arena, stir- 
 ring the earth over a little space for the prize 
 of a cauldron or painted vase. He is beyond 
 the compute of things ; the present is gone 
 from him ; his eye is bent upon something 
 beyond the gaps of war or the curve of the 
 course, or the spectators tier on tier beyond. 
 He searches another bourne ; the shouts of men 
 are distant to him as the murmur of gnats; 
 the breath of pursuing horses upon his shoulder 
 goes unheeded as the natural air. He is 
 beyond measure of space ; not in the battle 
 or the concourse, but alone with himself like 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 3 1 
 
 a star in immensity, consumed with gathering 
 flames and careless of all but an unseen goal. 
 The Maenad, though known but in an ancient 
 copy, is of the same kindred. She floats for- 
 ward like a billow that confronts the wind, 
 with head flung back and tossing hair, wavelike 
 in all her contours, a child of the deep astray 
 upon the earth and called by some wild memory 
 back to ocean. Wavelike she flows on, to be 
 broken on the shore that no man knows. And 
 that head of a maid or goddess from Acropolis 
 bears the like witness, though in her the desire 
 of the things beyond is held in a supreme 
 restraint. In the bloom of life she gazes 
 upward and outward, looking intently upon a 
 distance, as if, like an Iphigenia warned, she 
 saw in it some place of deepening shadows 
 towards which her youth is driven for sacrifice. 
 There is yearning in them, and a half-subdued 
 dismay ; beneath the proved composure, the 
 passionate hope for a sign delayed. Here is 
 a soul which yet waits her hour; when the 
 sign glows upon the darkness she shall forsake 
 all to follow; wherever lie the way, on every 
 
 Scopas. 
 
32 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 Scopas. path h er feet shall be set firm, and her heart 
 prove its valiance. A goddess, but mortally 
 impassioned ; anxious in a world unknown, 
 marvelling, doubting, unserene. This virginal 
 life is not poised : it pulses, dilating and con- 
 tracting with the heart it quickens. These lips, 
 might the soul be absolved of silence, would 
 tell you in a strain of prophecy, visions of the 
 Erythraean Sibyl, things that reach back into 
 the shadow of oblivion and out towards the 
 mysteries of coming time. But they are mute 
 to us ; though we ask of her a thousand times, 
 they shall not be moved. Has she already 
 lost, or not yet attempted ? Is she mocked 
 by a disillusion, or perplexed by some warning 
 of a dream ? Does she doubt of a -divine love, 
 or mislament an earthly passion ? Or having 
 sung to deaf gods, does she wait for her wander- 
 ing music to return ? This is the countenance 
 of all humanity, troubled by the first whisper 
 of the Sirens' song; it is the classical embodi- 
 ment of Romance. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 33 
 
 III 
 
 It was so, by some lyric phrase arraigning 
 the set life, by some high fancy of a philoso- 
 pher, by a sculptor's seeming aberration, that 
 the Sirens were veritably known to men while 
 Greece was still Greece, and free. The place 
 for the breach was chosen, a party within the 
 walls won over ; what need to recount the 
 taking of the city, when it befell in the full- 
 ness of unmerciful time ? For awhile, even 
 after the disaster, the old law of measure 
 was allowed to stand ; but at last the sub- 
 stance smouldered away ; it became adust. It 
 remained as a writing upon a paper charred 
 through and through, in a dead stillness a 
 dead thing, telling only this that once it had a 
 meaning, and hardly more material than the 
 breath by which it should be destroyed. The 
 breath came out of the East like a breeze 
 heavy with Sabaean fragrances ; it brought 
 into the West frenzies, strange loves, unknown 
 mysteries. In the very Parthenon there was 
 set up an oriental creed ; the Sirens triumphed ; 
 
 The in- 
 sufferable 
 Mean. 
 
34 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The in- 
 sufferable 
 Mean. 
 
 the defeat of Xerxes was avenged. The 
 shadow of the immeasurable passed over the 
 land of measure ; last indignity of all, it flowed 
 onward to the seven hills of Rome, leaving 
 Hellas aside as a province superseded, a place 
 of no account. The world was enfranchised 
 from her law, which might no more become 
 law universal than the architecture so evoca- 
 tive of her spirit might satisfy the desire of 
 every people. The Hellenic temple soothes 
 and delights the mind, persuading it of a 
 power in man strong to achieve all things ; in 
 every part, and in the whole, it is instinct 
 with a supreme grace and continence. The 
 columns spring like living stems ; and as, in 
 the tree, the risen sap flows easily along the 
 branches, so all upward effort is diffused along 
 these entablatures and ebbs in a harmony of 
 receding lines. The roof, with its broad 
 gable, confines and embraces the whole ; its 
 calm length, its quiet overshadowing, are 
 symbols of a world summed, contained, and 
 pacified. The temple of Segesta, framed in 
 its peaceful hills, consents with all seen 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 35 
 
 Nature, and in the hour of our devotion there 
 seems no thought ennobling the relation of 
 man and universe which, in the language of 
 its great day, it should not beautifully pro- 
 claim. Exacting beyond reason might the life 
 appear, for which this absolute grace were not 
 enough. And yet it does not suffice ; it leaves 
 unsatisfied the half of the insurgent human 
 soul. Consummate though it be, and fortified 
 against all the surprises and aggressions of 
 infinity, it yet remains a pattern of the half 
 soul and a regional perfection. The mad 
 yearnings, the misgivings, the revolts of the 
 enchanted spirit find here no countenance ; it 
 is too wholly of the gods, to whom alone is 
 given the life without bewitchment : the gods, 
 whose every desire is appeased, who are never 
 long fasting, whose cups run over. As for the 
 ungodlike mass of men multiplying at large 
 upon the earth, the glory of it elates and 
 flatters them, but is ever incongruous with 
 their discontent ; they essay it, but rise unsat- 
 isfied, tasting an ambrosia which is not for a 
 mortal hunger. It cannot assuage the dark 
 
 The in- 
 sufferable 
 Mean. 
 
36 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The in- 
 sufferable 
 Mean. 
 
 The 
 building 
 
 of 
 Romance. 
 
 disturbing fancies or take the poison from the 
 unquiet mind. For them it is spectacular, 
 and reserved for rare days ; to the perturbable 
 brood of man, in the usual hour of conflict, a 
 thing insufferably serene. 
 
 In the dark ages, when Greece and her 
 works were for a time forgotten, the Sirens, 
 wearied with their victorious war, went apart, 
 and in a cavern filled with tremulous wave- 
 light dreamed centuries away. Many in those 
 times saw Pan, when he stole across the 
 moonlight, or lay among the rocks, pondering 
 the hour when he should come back to his 
 own. And many heard the Sirens singing in 
 their dream the song that goes over the world. 
 But none saw face to face, or heard to the full 
 end. The god fled ; the music died unappre- 
 hended, like that strange chime of ocean 
 which sounds out of the deep and is lost 
 again, when the still night breathes mystery 
 in summer. But when at last the time of 
 preparation was fulfilled, the Sirens awoke 
 like the Seven of Ephesus, refreshed, and 
 prescient of their greater fortune. For the 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 37 
 
 barbarians had changed the face of the earth ; 
 like the Avenger of the prophet, they had 
 flowed with an overrunning flood and pursued 
 their enemies into darkness. The minds of 
 men were renewed, and by that long darkness 
 made propense to shadows, as if they had 
 been coloured by the grey stormy heavens 
 in which alone Victory would now spread 
 her wing. Athens was unknown ; her art 
 buried, her literature in exile ; no power stood 
 now protective between the Sirens and man- 
 kind. So they sang to the master-builder an 
 unthwarted song. They made him body forth 
 the theory of life which Greece refused to 
 utter; they tempted and incited and beset, 
 until the Gothic style arose and all the 
 charmed stone proclaimed them. There are 
 minds, exact and critical, which reject this 
 name of Gothic, as unworthy of an exalted 
 art; yet the term is not so ill imagined, or 
 without its poetry, allusive as it is to a certain 
 indomitable wildness in this style, a character 
 of aboriginal strength, drawn, as it were, from 
 the blood of Amals. Is there no point and 
 
 The 
 building 
 
 of 
 Romance. 
 
3* 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 building 
 
 of 
 Romance. 
 
 virtue in a name which so tersely conveys 
 the essential severing quality between the 
 mediaeval and the Hellenic art ? They who 
 first aspersed by it, baptised more honourably 
 than they willed, giving to us who have come 
 after, in place of their obscuring slight, a 
 gleam of underlying truth. For the great 
 Gothic churches rise as if, like Amphion's 
 walls, they had been called to birth by music ; 
 and to music they rose indeed, an Amcebean 
 strain of angels and Sirens, in which the Sirens 
 could never be chanted down. The unrest 
 which the Greek temple denies, the cathedral 
 of the Middle Ages cries to heaven. The 
 high vaults bear down upon the walls, holding 
 them in an unpausing fierce resistance. All 
 here is pitted and opposed ; force visibly 
 meets force as when wrestlers stand breast to 
 breast, in appearance still, but alert, and feel- 
 ing after the first faint sign of advantage. 
 You seem, by a stretch of fancy, to hear 
 sounds issue from these walls, the gasp of the 
 caught breath, the sigh of the living creature 
 in tense endurance. Every stone speaks of 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 39 
 
 struggle ; all urges and ascends, from the 
 buttresses which rise one above the other as 
 if they stormed the height, to the pinnacles 
 and the spires beyond, losing their vanes 
 among the clouds. All the huge structure 
 strives and undergoes ; there are hours when 
 it seems to lament and supplicate. But always 
 it speaks of souls committed to the dread 
 adventure of living, for whom there may be 
 no rest in any Hellenic dream of harmony. 
 When you see the high nave of Amiens occupy 
 the heavens, or Chartres upon its hill, or 
 Lincoln, some dream of finality accomplished 
 may at first deceive the mind ; you may think 
 of the Seraphic Doctor, or of Vincent of 
 Beauvais, building up knowledge into one all- 
 contenting whole. But draw nearer, and per- 
 ceive the wide-flung shadows, the cavernous 
 entrances, the ranks of pointing stone, the 
 multitude of limbs and features conspiring 
 upward in one sustained ascent; it is no 
 longer the pride in human wisdom achieved 
 which compels the mind ; rather the mortal 
 dismay of lowliness shall gain you, the sense 
 
 The 
 building 
 
 of 
 Romance. 
 
40 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 building 
 
 of 
 Romance. 
 
 of the undone, the yearning after the undis- 
 covered. It is not the silver voice of Aquinas 
 that you hear, but the groan of Abelard under 
 the thrust of his untamed desire. All that 
 the Greek suppressed, here finds its utterance ; 
 that which an Ictinus could not say, is out- 
 spoken by a Robert de Luzarches. It is by a 
 grace of good event, and full of morality, that 
 the visible forms of Sirens are sometimes 
 carved upon mediaeval portals. The clerks 
 will tell you that they are there to point a 
 moral of Honorius, the plain old moral against 
 luxury and the pride of life. Yet any who 
 will, believe it ; let them search the bestiaries 
 and take council with the drear scholastics. 
 But none who have heard the song are igno- 
 rant of this, that the strange sculptured figures 
 are not there for edification only, but also for 
 a witness ; they are there as the emblems of 
 that life upon which the Greek refused to let 
 men look, the life untranquil and thwarted of 
 achievement, the life enchanted away from 
 happiness, so far away, into such a mystery 
 of distance, that the things which it may here 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 4i 
 
 fulfil become indifferent, and the love of the 
 whole soul goes out to things upon which 
 the possessing hand has never closed. In this 
 great art of the North, the Sirens made the 
 world confess them; here they established 
 against the classic arrogation the equal claim 
 of Romance. Not the coloured chivalry of 
 knights, show of blazons, joy of jousts, charm 
 of the gai scavoir; not a posture of affliction in 
 minds unmatured ; not a literary fashion ; not 
 reverie by lakes, or high sentiment in moun- 
 tains, the facile tears of Rene or the fanfarons 
 of Ruy Bias ; Romance is fulfilled in none of 
 these things. But Romance is the root or 
 substance of which all these are inessential 
 accidents ; it is the dark water under the gay 
 barge, the rock which holds the samphire, the 
 texture over which the bright embroidery runs. 
 It is that which shall remain when these are 
 wrecked, or withered, or torn away, that which 
 was before their beginning; the answer of the 
 human soul under compulsion of infinity, the 
 mood of a vast desire hungry still when 
 the sops of happiness are gone. 
 
 The 
 building 
 
 of 
 Romance. 
 
42 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 Dante 
 
 and 
 
 Odysseus. 
 
 Though the master-builders had proclaimed 
 them, the Sirens were not yet content ; they 
 sought a poet to spread their message in a 
 southern land. They sang to Dante a sover- 
 eign music, inweaving in it marvels resistless 
 in the new age ; they sang of Odysseus, how, 
 by spite of Greeks, he had been dishonoured 
 for their sake. The seer of lost worlds under- 
 stood the mysterious heroic soul ; he gazed 
 down into it, where, himself deceived, he had 
 set it among the crooked in counsel; and 
 suddenly, as the twin-crested flame swayed to 
 and fro before him, the splendour and surge 
 of inward light broke forth, which jealous men 
 have not the power to quench nor magnani- 
 mous gods the will. His own soul flowed to 
 it with an answering fire ; the glory of infinite 
 adventure called to him by the voice of the 
 arch-wanderer, and the overclouding of it by 
 ignorance or malice prepense became abom- 
 inable to him as a proven wrong. As he 
 pondered, he discovered the old injustice : 
 even the Homeric ending was now false to 
 him ; its divine flight was spoiled, the greater 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 43 
 
 poetry abased at the will of earthlings. A 
 hater of all turbulence and lover of ancient 
 grandeur, he yet did not shrink from violence 
 to the famous story, perceiving it his business 
 to make that high type among men resplendent 
 before other eyes, as now before his own. It 
 was as when a discoverer's hand removes 
 from a statue ill-restored some added and 
 incongruous head, setting upon it once more 
 the authentic brow and features : upon the 
 instant all is changed, the makeshift that once 
 pleased becomes intolerable ; in this form and 
 no other we know that the sculptor embodied 
 his dream. Dante is direct and fearless; he 
 renews as if the whole poem were his own. 
 With the economy of great art he ends all in 
 a score of memorable verses, which disengage 
 the figure of Odysseus from the falsity and 
 hardness of the later legend ; the veil falls 
 away like a frippery, baring to the sun the 
 form of the hero as he had lived and was now 
 worthily to die. We see no longer the mean 
 antagonist who went down into Egypt after 
 poisoned arrows; the obedient minister of 
 
 Dante 
 
 and 
 
 Odysseus. 
 
44 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 Dante 
 
 and 
 
 Odysseus. 
 
 tyrants is gone, and the heartless logician of 
 the Attic drama. In his stead we see one 
 of an all-comprehending sight, no reckoner of 
 gains or balancer of dark expedients, but a 
 warrior too proud to feint or foin with weak- 
 lings, and even in his decay fierce for the great 
 adventure. That " little speech " is wonderful 
 in which the comrades of the last voyage for- 
 get all their feebleness, though their still 
 harbour is far behind them, and before them 
 the unsailed Ocean of the West, awful even to 
 strong men. It is no marvel that a tale thus 
 magically told should have graven itself in the 
 hearts of other poets, who found revelation in 
 it as from a chapter of life written at one 
 dipping of the pen with the high simplicity of 
 a scripture ; the exceeding fire of its truth 
 burned it into the memory of our own poet, 
 who, in the mere retelling, rose to a rare height 
 by communion with a greater genius. The 
 message once proclaimed, the old end of 
 the Odyssey is tame to us and unworthy of its 
 earlier course ; the mountain river flags by 
 clay banks; it dies sluggishly into a leaden 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 45 
 
 sea. What blindness would have had us bid 
 farewell to the returned Odysseus at his hearth- 
 side, leaving him to a quiet death in the full- 
 ness of his time and among his own people ? 
 It is flat inconsequence that such a one should 
 belie the whole meaning of his life, sinking 
 into a last ease at the end of it. Great 
 adventurers do not so die, least of all they 
 who have heard out the Sirens' music. But 
 how natural it is, when the hero rises up, and 
 the word is passed for sailing ; how it stirs 
 the blood, when the lords of Ithaca obey the 
 call, when they step the mast with stiff arms 
 of age, and having poured libation to Poseidon, 
 sail for the world's end without a doubt or 
 question, as if they went upon the affairs of a 
 common day. And when they have passed 
 the Pillars of Heracles, and with a following 
 wind run out into the ocean towards the baths 
 of the Western stars, what inevitable Tightness 
 sounds out of the words : " Remember the seed 
 from which ye sprang. Ye were not fashioned 
 for animal content, but to follow after valour 
 and understanding." Aye, it is all in the 
 
 Dante 
 
 and 
 
 Odysseus. 
 
4 6 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Dante 
 
 and 
 
 Odysseus. 
 
 divine way of nature when at last there looms 
 a dark mountain, and there descends from it a 
 blast that spins the ship about, crushing it like 
 a shell in the crossing tides. And when, in 
 view of the Fortunate Isles, far from Ithaca, 
 in a whirlwind and a darkness, Odysseus and 
 his crew go down in forty fathoms, it is the 
 end which the Sirens sung, and the gods willed, 
 and Destiny foreordained. In this death these 
 wanderers are themselves ; they have not aban- 
 doned the quest ; they have been faithful to 
 the last hour. Meeting his doom so, the great 
 hazarder fulfils a destiny for which his whole 
 life was prelude. The conclusion brings relief ; 
 it exalts at once and satisfies. We had not 
 misread the heroic nature ; we were right 
 when we knew that it was never for him to sit 
 as a grandsire in an ingle, who carried home 
 the Sirens' music and gave it echoing-place in 
 the rafters of his hall. We did not err, know- 
 ing surely in our hearts that there must come 
 an hour when its melodies should awaken and 
 gather to a tumult, when the door should at 
 last be flung wide, and he should rise up to go 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 47 
 
 with every true man of his fellowship behind 
 him. In the old Odyssey that hour never 
 sounds ; the tale swerves at the end under 
 some pressure of weariness or convention ; 
 Odysseus drifts upon the years like the steers- 
 man who nods over the tiller and lets it sway 
 out of his hand. The roamer over immeasur- 
 able leagues lies down at the last to wait his 
 death ; he dies upon a bed, like a faint man, 
 by inches. This end is an offence, and a 
 Lucian can but cheapen it with his sneers. 
 All is nobler in the Divine Comedy ; the right 
 Odysseus comes again ; the false eidolon which 
 defamed him is driven even from the world of 
 Shades. 
 
 Poetry had begun the wrong ; it was meet 
 that poetry should sing the palinode. The 
 Sirens were justified with the hero, and dis- 
 covered as the chosen instruments of fate. 
 Of all the persons in the Epic, they only might 
 be invoked to explain the new event of the 
 story ; none else could have urged to that last 
 revolt against the flickering, fanned life of age. 
 The end was indeed made certain in the hour 
 
 Dante 
 
 and 
 
 Odysseus. 
 
 The " 
 Sirens' 
 power. 
 
4 8 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 Sirens' 
 power. 
 
 when Odysseus stood bound with cords, drink- 
 ing in sweet sounds and storing his memory 
 with enchantment ; it was then that the wan- 
 derer knew he should die wandering, to become 
 the exemplar of a passion indelible from the 
 heart of man. Two vast desires pulse through 
 all things, one for rest, the other for endeavour, 
 eternally renewed upon fresh planes and 
 through unfolding mysteries world without end. 
 All in us that is physical and worn by time 
 yields to the first, all that is ponderable verges 
 to its fulfilment. The heaviness of the crea- 
 tion works for it ; the subsidence of things 
 prepares its victory. A natural philosopher 
 has said that Matter longs for rest ; that the 
 state to which it tends is not perfection, but 
 death ; that were the yearning of the atoms 
 fulfilled, the world would be locked in lasting 
 sleep. But against this dull trending towards 
 repose is matched in primordial opposition a 
 desire of motion in its nature spiritual, a vital 
 quick antagonist, wherever the bolder life moves 
 in its pilgrimage over the earth. Of this desire 
 the Sirens sing, and therefore it is that they 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 49 
 
 survive all change, coeval with the world, and 
 living out all its ages. 
 
 IV 
 
 Against the enchantresses who foiled Hellas, 
 simplicity strives in vain. Such elemental 
 spells are theirs that they would surely charm 
 all thought, did not the kindlier gods fear for 
 men, seeking to close their ears by artifice, as 
 by her device of wax Calypso saved the com- 
 panions of Odysseus. The gods thus pre- 
 serve the many ; yet they would not, if they 
 might, save all, or wholly prevent the danger. 
 For desiring man to rise, they must needs 
 allow him the perilous way, and when a new 
 height must be scaled, consent to sacrifice 
 that his race may climb nearer their shining 
 seats. They consent with pain, resisting still 
 the sacrifice beyond hope and the profitless 
 waste of life ; but Fate, which is above them 
 and blind, confounds their purpose, driving 
 within the range of the music souls which their 
 mercy would fain have spared. Fate is hard ; 
 she will not suffer choice or pity ; the Sirens 
 
 Their 
 
 common 
 
 prey. 
 
5° 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Their • 
 common 
 prey. 
 
 must sing to all whom she sends towards them, 
 winning by her fault their evil name for cruelty. 
 They may not do the kind gods' will, and 
 tempt strength or genius only ; all must hear 
 who are driven upon their path, the weak with 
 the strong, the crew with the captain, the 
 faint with the ardent soul. Might they have 
 charmed genius alone, even Greece had praised 
 them ; for when genius obeys the song, it is 
 never wholly thwarted; it brings back from 
 the high places of adventure that which may 
 be heard or seen, that which is laudable of 
 men, and abides among them for a witness ; 
 some image of a divine form, some lingering 
 word of angels, some echo of an immortal 
 music; fragments snatched from a world half 
 apprehended, but like sweet fruits of Eden 
 refreshing the descended soul. Genius is 
 repaid for half its suffering; yet even the 
 creative life is haunted by the Imagined Bet- 
 ter Thing, which in more vivid shapes than 
 any seen of dull minds, will ever arise behind 
 the thing achieved, and deform its beauty for 
 the achiever, until that which all the world 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 5 1 
 
 praises is to him who wrought it the work of 
 miscreant fancy or the visible nonsense of a 
 duped brain. Genius creates ; genius may buy 
 with blood ; it can afford the cost, and, after 
 all the waste, has some residue of the purchase. 
 But woe to those who are made to dream the 
 creator's dream without his finer understand- 
 ing or his skill of capture. 
 
 These are the true victims of the Sirens, 
 the great company of the enchanted, who for 
 an hour of bliss pay dearly by long days of 
 inachievement. These are they whose undo- 
 ing, so purposeless, so vain, appears an abuse 
 of immortal powers. Surely it is a hard thing 
 that the divine maleficent song should lure 
 towards the height which genius reaches the 
 soul which can never win the vision, but, 
 dazed with a moment's joy, is held ineffectual 
 in a frustrate anguish of attention. The won- 
 ders half-revealed are too far or brilliant for 
 this straining sight; all vanishes and flows 
 away, like the beauty of an unknown country 
 under the lightning of a summer night when 
 we are borne across it on swift wheels, never 
 
 Their 
 
 common 
 
 prey. 
 
 The 
 
 maleficent 
 
 song. 
 
52 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 maleficent 
 
 song. 
 
 to return or see it under the sure light of day. 
 Life is despoiled of peace for the chance hear- 
 ing of one song : life, the best gift df gods ; 
 the flawless jewel is darkened and may never 
 shine tranquilly again. Shall there not be 
 pardon for him whom the mockery of false 
 promise drives to impious complaint ? The 
 marvels half-descried are lost beyond his utter- 
 ance, yet they will not vanish from his life, or 
 leave him to the old peace, but like a mist 
 indissoluble of the sun, haunt him still with 
 their useless gleams and splendours. They 
 trouble the soul ; they sadden the colours of 
 the world. The cadences heard in those heights 
 descend to him in the low places as a thin mur- 
 mur out of the infinite distance, ghostly chords 
 and evanescent harmonies which come and go 
 too fitfully for apprehension. So the lark sings 
 on a boisterous day high above a crossing 
 wind : it is sure he sings, for ever and again a 
 note will fall earthward ; but the strained ear 
 may not link into their first order the jewels 
 of scattered sound ; they are gone ; the winds 
 have withdrawn them into immensity, wonders 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 53 
 
 confusedly heard, and glories rendered to 
 oblivion. It is well that the rumour of com- 
 mon life drowns wholly for the mass of men 
 the echo of the Sirens' voice ; it is well that of 
 all earth's millions, thousands only hear. If 
 we but knew, the thunder of the noisy world 
 against which we murmur is a power of safety 
 over life, and often they who rail most loudly 
 against it have best cause for giving thanks. 
 For that all-enfolding din saves more men than 
 the Greek's exclusive reason ; the hebetude 
 born of labour stops more ears than wax. 
 Long joyless poverty in that tumult is nearer 
 happiness than this fantastic affluence which 
 deceives the hungry heart. For across the 
 solitude the insidious voice comes rounding in 
 the ear; there is an end of acquiescence in 
 the good things that are ; there rises a mad 
 desire for the visionary grace, the whole being 
 sways to a tide of strange rebellion. And the 
 voice speaks very sweetly, in its melody 
 beyond resistance : " Happiness is a mean 
 gift; it is the animal's ease. But man was 
 not born to go the way of oxen, with his eyes 
 
 The 
 
 maleficent 
 
 song. 
 
54 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 maleficent 
 
 song. 
 
 The 
 
 Imagined 
 Better 
 Thing. 
 
 bent earthward, imagining his homestead all 
 the universe. For whom, if not for man, are 
 the horizons robed in light and colour, and the 
 heavens sown with quivering stars ? Awake, 
 O touched of Circe's wand, fallen semblances 
 of men, win back the diviner form, and with it 
 the divine desire. Shall the fish leap out above 
 his stream and the mole explore the day, but 
 man keep within set pales and bind his soul 
 upon a tether ? " 
 
 It is the voice, accursed of the Greeks ; it 
 is the Sirens' voice. Whosoever gives ear, is 
 straightway rapt far from the good common 
 things that he might have loved; when he 
 returns to them, they are transformed for him 
 and hateful ; he may no longer have the same 
 pleasure of them; they satisfy his soul no 
 more. The harmonies of life are become a 
 vague dissonance, tuneless and persistent, like 
 an Arab song. In the well of satisfaction 
 rises a water of gall ; the very duty fulfilled 
 leaves behind it a remorse for something 
 haply overlooked or misaccomplished ; until 
 another hour of vision comes, there is nothing 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 55 
 
 but the life preoccupied, the doing without 
 zeal, the hearkening without attention. Pursu- 
 ing the smooth paven ways, he seems to him- 
 self sedulous over trivial aims, and provident 
 of supervacuous ends ; the vanity of all these 
 things is so transparent to him that the busi- 
 ness of material existence becomes a by-work, 
 an idle labour of perfunction ; what is it but a 
 screen or cloak to interpose between curious 
 eyes and the secret errantry of the soul ? Let 
 the Imagined Better Thing but distantly 
 appear, and the beauty of all beside is dis- 
 coloured in the contrast, as the hue of a lowlier 
 stone pales before the royal glow of sards. 
 For the desire of this, the good things of use, 
 the deeds rich in content, are tedious to him 
 and profitless; and if the absent mind have 
 no success among these, how much less the 
 absent soul ? While he gives them his forced 
 interest, impassioned longing for things beyond 
 breaks in upon his labour and makes it vain. 
 He stands amid the swathes reaping ; suddenly 
 the full ears at his feet are vile to him for the 
 beauty of some zone of distant poppies. He 
 
 The 
 
 Imagined 
 
 Better 
 
 Thing. 
 
56 
 
 SI RENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 Imagined 
 
 Better 
 
 Thing. 
 
 stays his scythe, and is left behind by the 
 whole company of reapers ; a scorn for all reap- 
 ing and garnering rises to a full flood within 
 him and possesses him to the last recesses of 
 his nature. From that hour he may work no 
 more. He lets fall the scythe and forsakes 
 the field and his fellow-labourers in this har- 
 vest ; his soul, like a bird escaped, flies forth 
 to those golden cities "ten months' journey 
 deep " in the dear wildernesses of imagination. 
 She has outlived the grey day ; it is over and 
 gone ; for a dreamwhile she will live the true 
 life, come what disaster may. Once more she 
 shall know the rapture of attempt, the quick- 
 ening smart of failure ; once more she shall 
 beat a divine air ; once more wing free under 
 the firmament and the unattainable stars. It 
 shall be a glory for her, but it shall be in vain ; 
 hers is no strength for the flight of eagles. 
 For him whose soul awakes to disillusion out 
 of this dream, the old joy of work and action 
 wanes ; existence grows cold, like a passion 
 prolonged beyond its hour by some blind 
 loyalty of habit. He moves towards all goals 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 57 
 
 indifferent ; he disputes with the shrugged 
 shoulder ; he concludes by passing on. The 
 midways of life become to him places for 
 digression, its interests trifles, parerga et parali- 
 potnena, negligible, vain things. If he explores 
 causes and effects, the problem solved is a 
 puzzle contrived for a child's understanding; 
 if he controls men, he is a mockery to himself, 
 and centurion of a hundred atoms. In this 
 lassitude he sees his day perish ; while his 
 hand hangs idly, the threads of human love 
 are ravelled. Pursuits and occupations are 
 naught, and work a dullness ; they malce no 
 music for him ; there is no rhythm of the iron 
 whereon they are forged and fashioned. It is 
 said of the second Cain that he had delight of 
 the sound of his hammers, perceiving intervals 
 and just accords, as his work sang to him 
 from the anvil and rejoiced his heart. To all 
 men whose soul is in their labour there sounds 
 the same music ; it is well with them ; they 
 are the happy ; they inherit the earth. But to 
 him who toils with a mutinous and transcend- 
 ing soul, the anvil rings untrue, the fire of the 
 
 The 
 
 Imagined 
 Better 
 Thing. 
 
58 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 Imagined 
 
 Better 
 
 Thing. 
 
 The rams 
 
 of 
 Nebaioth. 
 
 forge dies down to ashes. And by this rough 
 practice the wings of his soul are frayed and 
 wounded ; he fears for it as the power of flight 
 is more and more impaired. " Knew ye not 
 that the soul that hath but few pens and 
 feathers, he may not well fly ? " 
 
 This, then, is the cruelty of the Sirens' 
 song : all who hear it, save they have genius, 
 are like to be spoiled for the good things that 
 satisfy. They are stricken beyond cure ; their 
 blood is tainted with a poison of disaffection. 
 Let a man once hearken to that music, and 
 thereafter in the world of practice he shall find 
 nothing after his own heart, while from the 
 visionary world he shall come but empty away. 
 Yet the world of visions is now the country of 
 his soul ; though he have no franchise of it, 
 he is less alien and exile there than in the 
 place of noise and war and traffic. Whenever 
 he may win free, he wanders back to the high 
 region of his discomfiture, like some deceived 
 inveterate lover whom no cruelty can keep 
 from his unprofitable devotion. For this mad- 
 ness he becomes a stock for scorn ; he is 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 marked as one without fixed course, eccentric 
 from the orbit of common fortune. His 
 neighbours compare his ineffectual pilgrimage 
 with their rewarded labour; while he wan- 
 dered, they have worked on ; they see his 
 fields empty, and the rams of Nebaioth graze 
 down their pastures. Nor, being mortal, can he 
 pass the lordly rams and always care nothing ; 
 when disillusion unseals his eyes, he also 
 must make comparison and cast a balance to 
 his undoing. He sees himself nothing in this 
 world of the worshipful and esteemed. Like 
 the sage in ancient China, he beholds them 
 happy as on a tower in spring while he has 
 small pleasure of existence ; they are full of 
 light ; he dwells obscure and desolate amid his 
 unfulfilled desires. Like the Christian mystic, 
 he is inwardly afflicted ; the sorrow pierces to 
 the very marrow of his soul. "That which 
 others say shall be heard ; what thou sayest 
 shall be accounted nothing. Others shall be in 
 great praise of men, but of thee shall no word 
 be." West and East tell him of the same 
 heart's-misery ; they mock him with cures which 
 
 59 
 
 The rams 
 of 
 
 Nebaioth. 
 
6o 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The rams* 
 
 of D 
 
 Nebaioth. 
 
 were never for his constitution. He turns to 
 go his ways alone, and expiate this condign 
 offence, that once he did not escape a wind 
 which bore the Sirens' song. The general life 
 grows with each day more hard to bear ; for 
 the impassioned thought, to him now the only 
 thought, will not endure close comradeship or 
 suffer him to pay the tribute which buys suc- 
 cess. It must ever take solitary flight, so indi- 
 vidual it is and hard to be imparted, unsocial, 
 and averse from the common law of reason. 
 It is told of lonely settlers who have dwelled 
 long upon the prairies inbreathing a vast air, 
 that they are disquieted in the streets of cities, 
 which are mean to them, and sinister with intol- 
 erable shadows of confinement. They chafe 
 like wild creatures captured ; at last they return 
 to the infinite plains where the sun in his rising 
 and going down is not walled from their sight, 
 knowing their wilderness homelier to them than 
 all that crowded world. It is so with him who, 
 drawn by the spell of the fatal music, has sped 
 even a bowshot towards Immensity. From 
 the habit of the large air he loses the love 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 61 
 
 of things precise and trimmed ; the huddling of 
 minds is sordid to him ; the alleys and base- 
 courts of logic are too close for his lungs. He 
 is enticed back into the solitary place ; he 
 yields to its call, a truant thenceforth from his 
 commonwealth. No moralist in Hellas would 
 have given him countenance in such desertion ; 
 the Spartans would have saved him from him- 
 self by rude discipline, and haled him off to the 
 mess by violence. But since Romance won 
 its right upon earth, there is no Laconian law, 
 only the law of the unregimented life, which 
 gives license to stray from the flock and be 
 rent upon the thorns. 
 
 V 
 
 I have heard of many lives, and seen more 
 than one, too deep sunken already in the 
 bewitchment to hope for their deliverance. I 
 knew a home which had sufficed a man for 
 happy years; it seemed his very own place, 
 apportioned for his peculiar need ; the peace 
 of it was the only wealth he valued. But the 
 Sirens sang, and insensibly he saw it with new 
 
 The rams 
 
 of 
 Nebaioth. 
 
 The 
 
 golden 
 
 cup. 
 
62 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 golden 
 cup. 
 
 eyes ; they charmed him into contempt for a 
 tranquillity bought at the price of straitness. 
 He felt himself inexplicably yield to wilful 
 aversions ; then, as the eyes reproached him 
 for whose joy till now he had laboured, he 
 covered the vestiges of remorse with shows 
 of strange impatience. Then repentance gave 
 place to callousness without shame. He ceased 
 to make excuse ; openly he forsook the duties 
 of mutual converse for abstruse adventure of 
 the sole mind, until at last the furies marked 
 him ; his very presence seemed to assert some 
 inhuman right of discommunion. The ease 
 of the shared life being gone, the life itself 
 chafed him. A deep discomfort of soul drove 
 him often abroad ; but all parched about him 
 like meadows in drought, where the fairy ring 
 alone keeps green. In truth the Sirens had 
 made a fairy ring for his soul ; thither they 
 enticed it, to mature under enchantment the 
 passion for difficult and exquisite things. This 
 man, once careless of his own privilege and 
 silent under every provocation, now shaped his 
 whole existence to one point of selfishness, 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 63 
 
 which glittered for him until he had eyes for 
 nothing beside. And now estrangement swiftly 
 grew between him and the soul chosen to be 
 one with his own 5 a hateful Rosicrucian pride 
 disjoined them ; he dared to feel the scorn of 
 the initiate for the profane. The old ties, at 
 first loosening slowly, soon drifted far apart, as 
 Destiny, weary of delay, set her own dexterous 
 fingers to the knot. For that other soul had 
 also her pride, and disdained to be rejected, 
 knowing nothing of the Sirens or their acknowl- 
 edged office under Fate. Her honest wrath 
 triumphed over all his subtlety, as at length, 
 outraged beyond conciliation, she went from 
 him, in the silence of her departure making 
 the fine protest of her life. The shock of that 
 abandonment almost saved him: could he 
 but have followed, she might have carried him 
 with her, an emigrant to some new land of 
 promise. But the Sirens were at hand to hold 
 him back ; their disespousing music sounded 
 in the empty house ; he went out in a cloud of 
 it, unrepenting. The Russians compare true 
 love to a golden cup, which may be crushed 
 
 The 
 golden 
 cup. 
 
64 
 
 SIRENI CA 
 
 The 
 golden 
 cup. 
 
 but never broken ; and they say that however 
 roughly it be used, by tender care it becomes 
 once more all that ever it was. But that is 
 only true of simple loves ; these only can be 
 made whole, as they were before the blow. All 
 the rest are too intricately graven, or too 
 lavishly enriched with enamel or with gems, 
 ever to win back their first form or the old 
 harmonious tones. The delicate and various 
 work, once impaired, may not be restored when 
 the hand that created them is gone, or the fur- 
 nace that fired them once extinguished. The 
 cup of this man's love was thus rich ; it was 
 therefore beyond repair. He left it crushed 
 behind him, and went his way to become a pre- 
 tender for invisible thrones, and to sit by the 
 hearth of his own no more. By diligence he 
 contrived almost to forget the former peace ; 
 but only because his life was now absorbed in 
 storms of change ; there was in it none of 
 the old long-pausing sweetness which wakes 
 remembrance, but in place of it such calm as 
 broods at the heart of cyclones and is ringed 
 with furious waters. He remained homeless 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 65 
 
 after he left that echoing house. The Sirens 
 do not suffer homes. 
 
 There was another household where two 
 together heard the music, just when, by a 
 trained coincidence of purpose, they seemed 
 to have found the true secret of contentment 
 and a clear path to fortune. They had been 
 strenuous beyond belief ; but now they were as 
 two dreamers on a farm of tares, with all their 
 barns emptying. Little had they cared, if 
 only their moods might still have accorded. But 
 often the joys and pains of their new state 
 were so perversely timed that when one was 
 with Hope upon the clouds, the other was 
 dungeoned below with Despair ; their spirits so 
 seldom moved as one, that they might have 
 been divorced, for all the comfort they had 
 of union. It was the comedy of enchantment, 
 as that other case the tragedy. Sometimes, 
 indeed, their moods and inspirations would for 
 a short while fall together, and then they were 
 like children who have drunk a strange milk, 
 and are wild with fears or delights incompre- 
 hensible to others. They amazed all who had 
 
 The farm 
 of tares. 
 
66 
 
 SIRENI C A 
 
 The farm 
 of tares. 
 
 The 
 
 enchanted 
 mill. 
 
 known them in their sobriety ; but they were 
 harmless to all save themselves ; for, as the 
 Elizabethan said, not everyone that sucketh 
 a wolf is ravening. While they themselves 
 rejoiced, their friends could have wept over 
 these consonant raptures and despairs ; they 
 saw in them too clearly the aggravation of 
 a fate heavy enough without, and an impetus 
 to a course that needed none. And, since the 
 Sirens, less kindly than the gods, will not aid 
 those whom they love to die young, this pair 
 has lived on to forget that they ever knew a 
 calmer lot. They are a sorrow or a diversion 
 to their neighbourhood, according as the hearts 
 of those who regard them are hard or pitiful. 
 Their estate is become a byword : there never 
 grew such tares. 
 
 And then there was a poor man who was 
 caught by the music, going to the mill one late 
 winter morning. It seemed to be only a sound 
 of birds calling out of the darkness ; and it 
 took him wholly unawares. After that day the 
 great revolving belts that hummed about him 
 at his work ceased to deaden his soul as before, 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 67 
 
 but called it into new wakefulness ; they were 
 so changed that they might have been the 
 music of the spheres. He lost time listening 
 to them ; he earned less ; his credit fell with 
 his overseer and comrades, the one suspecting 
 him of brooding mischief, the others writing 
 him down a madman. For a time he seemed 
 irresolute what key to strike in answer to that 
 strange music. At first he was enraged at the 
 injustice which kept him moiling in a maze of 
 wheels and cogs, while so many had freedom 
 for thought and fancy; but gradually he per- 
 ceived in that machinery a perfect plant for 
 the manufacturing of the dreams he loved, 
 there being no place known to him so favour- 
 able to this as the mill, and no hours so won- 
 derful as some of those which he passed in its 
 walls. For other men it might produce com- 
 modities or wages; but to him it gave at 
 rare moments, in overflowing measure, things 
 unsaleable and splendid, so that by degrees the 
 suspicious mood left him and he abandoned 
 thoughts of enmity to oafs and ruffians. As 
 years went by, the principle of his existence 
 
 The 
 
 enchanted 
 
 mill. 
 
68 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 The 
 
 enchanted 
 mill. 
 
 became more and more a mystery to those 
 about him ; it seemed to remove ever further 
 from their understanding into unsearched 
 deeps of the man's being, as in the aged the 
 life shrinks into far physical recesses where 
 even death is perplexed and slow to find it. 
 Something other than his labour was wearing 
 him to a shadow ; his look seemed that of one 
 anxious before the time and listening for a 
 curfew at noonday. He was negligent of him- 
 self, and would often have starved but for those 
 of whose presence about him he seemed but 
 half aware. This man also lost the peace of 
 his home ; it became to him a tent in Kedar, 
 a place for the sleep of weariness, and housing 
 visions less well than the dream-factory with its 
 booming music. His own folk, in the wisdom 
 of the simple, took some witchery for granted, 
 and let him be, according to his own desire of 
 being. They endured his unprofitableness as 
 a judgment, and lived on less to cover the 
 damage of the visitation. If times were bad, 
 they might give him a hard word j but their 
 common way was to excuse him to each other 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 69 
 
 by nods and winks silently exchanged behind 
 his back. For all that they did to mar him, he 
 might have been always happy ; but the mis- 
 chief lay in his own breast where the Sirens' 
 song had brought it. Fair weather or foul, he 
 would walk leagues of Sundays over fields and 
 hills, and along the brown river, coming back 
 so tired that he would be late at the mill gate 
 next morning. Sometimes, in the prime of 
 the year, he would disappear for days, return- 
 ing with the look of a conspirator, or of a spy 
 fresh from Eldorado. Dejection followed, 
 until they urged him back amid the machinery, 
 which in time reconciled him to a continuance 
 of life. So year in year out they kept him 
 somehow at work, and a roof over his head, until 
 some shock of mental change laid him dead 
 among them with his secret undiscovered. 
 
 So many there are whose lives are thus 
 forfeit at a beck, that sometimes a doubt creeps 
 into the mind whether, after all is said, the 
 loud genius of this age triumphs, or whether 
 the Sirens begin once more to gain on the world. 
 Is it so sure that, in this stour and welter of 
 
 The 
 
 enchanted 
 mill. 
 
 The 
 
 Citadel of 
 
 Noise. 
 
7 o 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 The 
 
 Citadel of 
 
 Noise. 
 
 confused hopes, we fare better against the 
 magic than the Greeks with their lucid scheme, 
 their fine positive convention ? There have 
 been so many strategies, and none final yet j 
 so often the Sirens have heard tell of their own 
 death. 'T was thought the Renaissance killed 
 them, overbrowing them with sheer pride of 
 life. But they came again, until once more 
 the eighteenth century held them at wits' length 
 by outworks drawn like the lines of Vauban. 
 Each period of resistance passed, the one like 
 glory of youth, the other like an accomplished 
 prime ; shall this dynamic genius of ours bring 
 a more lasting conquest? It has achieved 
 great things; but perchance we expect of it 
 what no human power can assure, letting our- 
 selves hope too fondly without cause. For it 
 seemed to come to us as an undreamed relief, 
 a god of the machine, proclaiming the life 
 mechanical ; it drowned the lament of Werther 
 and the tumid voice of Manfred with such a 
 burst of sound that we fancied the reign of all 
 insidious arts at an end for ever and a day. 
 Man committed his handicrafts to wheels and 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 7i 
 
 pistons ; he steamed to his goal ; he filled the 
 earth with clangour, bandying his discords 
 across ever vaster space, until no sound which 
 held of music was like to survive the unanswer- 
 able cacophony. Here at last seemed final 
 safety; the earth reverberant, Romance protest- 
 ing in all metres to gods and men, and cast 
 beyond appeal. But in all this heyday the 
 sanguine world forgot once more the character 
 of the adversary. That pertinacity which the 
 logic of the Hellene could never rebut was not 
 to be quelled by din. The Sirens studied the 
 new warfare ; Ligeia sent forth a carrying 
 voice to penetrate the central tumult. Our 
 increased immunity against bewitchment may 
 prove but a bare assumption ; for souls are still 
 everywhere decoyed, and of those most visibly 
 enchanted, many are taken in the central bruit, 
 snatched from the inviolable citadel of noise. 
 The world goes on — more fortune to the roar 
 of it — and the multitude does not perceive the 
 loss, each vanishing unmarked as a man may 
 drown in a splashing crowd of bathers. But 
 the watchful grow uneasy, doubting the worth 
 
 The 
 
 Citadel of 
 Noise. 
 
72 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 The 
 
 Citadel of 
 Noise. 
 
 of the new violence. To them it seems that 
 the chosen guardians are no longer a sure 
 defence ; the ears of Cerberus relax, the goose 
 gives up the Capitol. And looking out upon 
 a world of gathering discontent, they wonder 
 if it were not well by some eclectic skill to 
 unite the schemes of all the combative ages, 
 and insinuate a Greek temperance amid these 
 turbulent forces. They begin to fear that no 
 system yet essayed shall wholly avail ; they 
 would combine the best of each, to attain the 
 one possible success, a resistance obstinate as 
 the attack. For the Sirens will always sing, 
 and many will always hear, and haply all that 
 is effected by our thunderclaps is to make the 
 hearing harder. 
 
 VI 
 
 Egyptians 
 
 of the 
 wayside. 
 
 The Sirens sing, and the victims of a chance 
 are urged beyond the endurance of their mor- 
 tality ; they grow unquiet as the sea tossing 
 beyond the last shore under clouds like visible 
 forms of sorrow. They cannot be resigned ; 
 
SI RENICA 
 
 73 
 
 the world is not their friend, nor the world's 
 law ; they murmur even against a better juris- 
 diction. Over the pages of the very Scriptures 
 dance minims and quavers of a music which 
 never accorded with that text, till the solemn 
 rubric sinks out of sight beneath them as a 
 stone under rippling water. They are poor, if 
 to desire unattainable things is poverty ; they 
 are mad, if a despair of peace is madness. 
 They do not find the cynic's wish fulfilled, that 
 the chains in this gaol of the world should be 
 warmed for the delicate among mortal pris- 
 oners. Seduced into a pursuit of visions, they 
 may not dream of quietness ; they must ever be 
 computing prospects, or making estimate of 
 their strength. The athlete, living for the day 
 of trial, is not more harassed than these, for 
 whom, as for the Stoic, life is rather a wrestler's 
 than a dancer's practice. The ruled existence, 
 whether of religion or of science, refuses to 
 them its thrice-blessed complacencies. They 
 are not content to treat with Infinity by dele- 
 gation, or learn of the deep at second hand 
 from the Delian divers of theology. It is not 
 
 Egyptians 
 
 of the 
 wayside. 
 
 U 
 
 ,1 
 
74 
 
 Egyptians 
 
 of the 
 wayside. 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 given them to find tranquillity either in the 
 daily ritual or in those appeasing exercises of 
 induction with which some natures would 
 replace the exercise of faith. The sameness of 
 set devotion irks them. Science repels by 
 exaggerated claims ; it is a practical system of 
 unrealities ; and they cannot prefer the special- 
 ist's fenced acre to the old Limitless of Anaxi- 
 mander. Religion itself they may have, but 
 unruly and individual, steeped in poetry to the 
 fabric of its articles, unsoothed by external 
 acts, indifferent alike to the manuals of sound 
 doctrine or the cordials of the belief which ails. 
 They must feed their souls after their own 
 way, like those idiorhythmic monks on Athos 
 who provide meats for themselves, and will not 
 be gathered in the common refectory. Though 
 they long sorely for a part in rites, and the solace 
 flowing from these, the fatal music always finds 
 them out in the churches, stealing between 
 Cantores and Decani until the spirit which was 
 almost soothed to acquiescence rebels again 
 and is made incredulous of its peace. They 
 would bestow all their goods for a ritual which 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 75 
 
 would compel to rest, some discipline of hard 
 rule enforced by an Ironside in doctrine ; but 
 when they seem to have found the one system 
 heaven-sent for their need, it fails them upon 
 the trial ; and there comes to them the ancient 
 fear that he who may love no human being per- 
 fectly shall never attain the love of God. The 
 Sirens sing, and all proves vanity. Remains 
 the sweet well-being of aspiration as Augustine 
 knew it, with the brightness, the fragrance, 
 the caressing presences by which, in elect 
 hours, humanity heightens all which it under- 
 goes ; glories of the dear earth carried heaven- 
 ward by the adventuring soul. That rare 
 emotion will sometimes seem more near attain- 
 ment; but it is personal to the individual 
 nature, and tires with its weakness ; it has no 
 strength of strands like the bond of a confed- 
 erated worship. The thin thread is snapped 
 continually ; and though it may be tied again 
 and again, it is a string of knots swaying in the 
 wind, with no support for heaviness. And 
 the ordered knowledge of facts has no better 
 comfort. For learning too wide for communi- 
 
 Egyptians 
 
 of the 
 wayside. 
 
7 6 
 
 Egyptians* 
 of the ' 
 
 wayside. 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 cation estranges from men ; and a narrow 
 learning, though it make for happiness, is often 
 so closely shut to sentiment that it chills 
 the enchanted mind. In the lairs of subdivided 
 knowledge, chascun dans sa chascuniere, each 
 with God's universe all to himself, dwell those 
 who have solved that final problem to their sat- 
 isfaction, and learned to bury the Infinite 
 below the Finite where it shall never disturb 
 them more. These also are happy ; the place 
 of the Sirens' liegemen can never be with these. 
 He and his kind are as the Egyptians of the 
 highway who tarry for a night under the clipped 
 garden-hedges ; but are driven on with the 
 morning, hag-ridden souls, misprising the given 
 good, and pursuing on hurt feet the marsh- 
 light of their illusion. Forever following, for- 
 ever thwarted, dreaming all and fulfilling 
 nothing, they would long for death, were it the 
 indisputable end of ends. But death too is 
 suspected of them as no last issue, itself a 
 phase in the processes of change, a vagrancy 
 continuing into another world the deception 
 born in this, where arch-achievement is of trifles 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 77 
 
 only, and nothing that is real or great is ever 
 utterly done. 
 
 And even the exalted paths of contemplation 
 are not true ways of escape ; though, with a 
 refinement of their first cruelty, the Sirens will 
 suffer one slave here and another there to steal 
 far along them and dream for a moment of 
 manumission. The soul of a sensitive cast they 
 will let climb from height to height of perverse 
 and delicate mislife, until it is grown almost 
 too fastidious to endure the ways of earth; 
 then, upon the very hour of its absorption into 
 the Infinite, they send their song up to it, to 
 draw it back to action and to itself. Such 
 usage they meted to Amiel, a soul unserviceably 
 fine like a vessel of rare glass made long ago 
 in a caprice by a cunning master in Murano. 
 Broken by the handling of the rough world, 
 buried deep under mounded sorrows, he 
 decayed to a marvellous iridescence, beautiful 
 with fugitive and delinquent splendours. A 
 vessel from which none ever drank sustaining 
 draughts, but thin potions of disillusion, elixirs 
 of a bewildering despair. For him there was 
 
 Amiel. 
 
7 8 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Amiel. 
 
 at last but one joy, to mark the audible stream 
 of time and the flowing downward of universal 
 being. All else that men call delight lost for 
 him its pertinence and sweetness ; in this alone 
 he found oblivion of many sufferings. While 
 this endured, the sorrow of his sterility was 
 fainter to him ; he knew suavity of release such 
 as the wounded and the sick may know when 
 the siege of physical pain is raised, and in the 
 passing away of agony, a film of ease floats 
 over the stilled consciousness. Qui scrutator est 
 majestatis opprimetur a gloria. The beatific 
 vision had spoiled his sight for all that was 
 nearer and more human ; when the radiance of 
 Infinity faded round him, he beheld forms 
 of men as through a telescope reversed, ants 
 of the wayside, unworthy of his regard to whom 
 all immensity lay open, and the sound of roll- 
 ing worlds was a familiar thing. His thought 
 flowed away in soft profusion ; the banks that 
 once held it were left unstrengthened and the 
 sluices unrepaired, until at last it had no 
 strength more for human service and was 
 evaporated in a lifeless waste of sand. Born 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 79 
 
 with all fine instincts of affection, intending 
 faithful comradeship, he forsook them without 
 knowing the betrayal. Personality grew pale 
 to him ; he lived aloof, disenamoured of appear- 
 ances, a shadow belated in embodiment. Yet 
 even this man was called back again and ever 
 again that he might taste the full bitterness of 
 vanity; even this man with his voice that 
 whispered of entranced worlds, like a tired wind 
 dying into the heart of wintry forests. 
 
 For the hard enchantresses will give men 
 over to the falsest hopes, letting them dream 
 even the Eastern dream of reabsorption into the 
 eternal being. They give them to see the celes- 
 tial Buddha in the clouds, the Lord of the 
 Measureless Light, the Deliverer who redeems 
 out of passion all with a pure heart calling ten 
 times upon his name. They suffer them to 
 approach the delicate hands used to benedic- 
 tion ; they leave them almost at the foot of the 
 lotus-throne. It is the most subtle of all their 
 cruelties. For there is in the Eastern dream 
 a peace which Hellas herself did not imagine, 
 the passionless calm which in the grey hours 
 
 Amiel. 
 
 The 
 Measure- 
 less Light. 
 
8o 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 Measure- 
 less Light. 
 
 the soul desires more than anything in earth 
 or heaven. There is in it that which even the 
 Christian hope but imperfectly assures, since 
 after personal redemption some old agony of 
 the several life might revive in an immortal 
 body. But should not the soul be absolved of 
 all this fear, and all that menace be removed 
 from her timeless prospect, if she obeyed the 
 bidding of those mild eyes and made the ten- 
 fold invocation ? The heaven of forms and 
 contours once abandoned, there should be no 
 peril of relapse, but lenient influences, oblivion, 
 deep peace, a chastity of imperishable light. 
 There are moods in which the countenance of 
 Amitabha can say more than the lit face 
 of Hermes, leader of souls, more than the 
 brows of the Christ of Pity. At such times, 
 when the feet have strayed out far from all 
 companionship and seem almost brought to the 
 flaming cincture of our world, the calm exotic 
 presence rises upon the dark as the lord proper 
 to an impending exile ; it persuades us by a 
 natural authority into treason, until then feared 
 more than death. But he whom the Sirens 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 81 
 
 hold under their enchantment may never enjoy 
 the promise. Before the invocation has passed 
 his lips, their voices come to him again, the 
 golden mist dissolves ; the august shape is lost 
 in a formless tide of light. And thereupon 
 the spirit is drawn back to a life made harder 
 by this dream, half initiate now, and chilled at 
 the thought of the puny strength in which once 
 it had taken its pride. It is dismayed by vast- 
 ness, and abased beneath the starry heaven, 
 having less hope than before that the power 
 which controls the galaxy should regard an 
 individual life here among men in the corner of 
 a minor star. With the scope of dismay 
 enlarged, it is condemned once more to fret 
 within the infinitesimal self, discovering a 
 deeper vanity in all things ; the kingdoms of the 
 earth are paltry plots, their histories a tale of 
 notches on a stick. Man passes away like the 
 shadow of a shade, like all that imagination 
 may conceive most frail and inessential ; 
 shall he not be suffered to pass unvexed, 
 in the silence which is the one privilege of 
 shades ? 
 
 The 
 Measure- 
 less Light. 
 
 II* 
 
82 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Edens 
 lost. 
 
 But whether the cruelty be simple, or refined 
 to this last subtlety among oriental visions, 
 none who have borne the yoke can shake it off, 
 or ever be wholly free again. There is a story 
 that in their first night of exile Eve and Adam 
 returned to Eden, picking their way in the 
 darkness where the angel seemed to sleep, his 
 sword glowing upon the ground beside him. 
 But when they came into the garden, it was all 
 changed. The creatures, that very day caressed 
 and fawning, now rose with bared fangs and 
 threatened them. The trees were still bowed 
 with fruit, but when they plucked and would 
 have eaten, they tasted only ashes. One tree 
 alone fulfilled its promise : it was the tree of 
 knowledge of good and evil, which had given 
 them understanding. Upon its branches the 
 orbed and ruddy fruit hung yet luscious, as 
 when the serpent praised it. They plucked and 
 plucked again, biting to the core in the hope 
 of slaked thirst and sated hunger. But from 
 the moment that they ate, hope fled ; a wintri- 
 ness touched Eden, and they felt it more deso- 
 late to them now than the outer world of exile. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 83 
 
 They were dismayed at the embittering of 
 kindly and familiar things ; the snarjing of great 
 beasts grew louder, unquiet footsteps closed in 
 narrowing circles round them. They looked 
 into each other's eyes, and, without a word or a 
 backward glance, went out again into the place 
 of weary labour. And now they did not walk 
 delicately as they approached the angel ; they 
 went with natural steps, as knowing the worst, 
 carelessly and without heed of danger. He saw 
 them depart, as he had seen them come ; but 
 his hand was holden, that they might see with 
 their own eyes and accept the judgment. 
 When they were gone forth, he rose to his feet 
 and girded on his extinguished sword. Dawn 
 was breaking j his work was done. Absolved 
 now of his ungrateful duty, he lightly spread 
 his wings, and soaring out over the four rivers 
 and the garden of God, was lost at one flight 
 in the clouds of morning. There is no restor- 
 ing of the protected Eden which to each was as 
 a royal garden of youth before the Sirens' song 
 was heard ; there is only such brief return, that 
 the soul may assure herself of her state and 
 
 Edens 
 lost. 
 
 / 
 
8 4 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Edens 
 lost. 
 
 see the lees in the cup of destiny. If in young 
 life the Sirens' music float towards you over 
 still waters, put the helm about while it is 
 yet an uncertain sound ; let those whose ears 
 are closed lash you to the mast until the 
 echoes are heard no longer. Beware lest for a 
 moment's heedlessness your days be consumed 
 away, lest kindred, fatherland, and friends be 
 lost to you, and your bones lie bleaching upon 
 that shore. Believe it not, when pride or 
 flattery would persuade that you are of a force 
 to meet the insidious danger ; none are of that 
 force, not even the heroes and the slayers of 
 many dragons. If fortune offers peace of hap- 
 piness, with all its estimable solid gain, its 
 neighbourhood of minds and profitable com- 
 munions, why go the lonelier way, consorting 
 with shadows, feeding upon vanity of dreams ? 
 You are like to become among men as the 
 poplar among the trees, too sensitive to dwell 
 in commonality, whitening the wayside with a 
 floss that none shall spin. Be wise, return 
 among the happy of mankind for whom laws 
 are framed and politics constructed ; who, 
 
 \ 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 85 
 
 trenching themselves within a pale and taming 
 down ambitions, receive their certain wages in 
 the weighed gold of tranquillity. For they only 
 hold a safer course who have never heard that 
 call, they whom the meditator in old Norwich 
 knew, souls " having not the apprehension to 
 deplore their own natures, and framed so far 
 within the circumference of hope that the wis- 
 dom of God has necessitated their content- 
 ment." 
 
 But if the die is cast, and the Imagined 
 Better Thing spoil for you even the good thing 
 in the moment of achieving, do not therefore 
 cease from action ; that were to lose the life 
 for the uncertain promise, propter vivendicaus as 
 perdere vitam. Remain among men ; fear that 
 inhuman solitude where the influence of sweet 
 charities is never known. The Sirens will not 
 forbid a forced activity in the interlude of their 
 enchantment ; they will rather approve, know- 
 ing that it keeps the nature in mobility and 
 prepared for the effort which they will demand 
 again in their hour. Use therefore all means 
 to be doing, lest a sick weariness of deeds, that 
 
 Edens 
 lost. 
 
 The 
 Second 
 Best. 
 
86 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 Second 
 Best. 
 
 old acedia or staleness of the uninterested 
 mind, creep into the blood of the great veins 
 and make despair a habit. Use every art, use 
 even jealousy itself ; it is marvel what a clean 
 envy without malice will do for one who in his 
 heart despises the things of competition. If 
 it cannot bring him joy of victory, it will yet 
 disturb indifference, and though the service of 
 the whole heart is of the greener virtue, there 
 is a good sap in the half. That is an old fallacy 
 which rejects all but the intense glow before 
 the deed ; "with half my heart " is not always 
 a fool's device, but often the word of considered 
 wisdom. It is a principle not despised by the 
 preacher of holiness, who knows the labyrin- 
 thine world, and the flesh in its presumption ; 
 it is better to toil for a dim spark, like the 
 savage, painfully revolving his drill for fire, than 
 to languish weary days in cold and idleness. 
 " Perform the outward action of fervour," says 
 St. Francis of Sales, " though the fervour itself 
 be lacking." It is a principle to which even 
 genius has been beholden. Many a true artist 
 sees the forms of his high fancy displaced by 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 87 
 
 crowding of baser shapes, and common life 
 encroaching upon him ; but he does not cease to 
 work; he paints on, that he may keep his 
 soul fluent and alert for the return of more 
 noble visions. Much he may do at such times 
 unworthy of his repute, but he lives watching, 
 and seizes the good hour upon the wing. Do 
 likewise upon your lower plane ; cold though 
 you be to deeds, yet keep doing. Be busy over 
 measurable things, be occupied with temporali- 
 ties and outputs ; their hold is stringent 
 to the soul, like a tightening of the belt upon 
 the body in hunger. At the worst there is 
 some gain from this feint of sustenance; the 
 nature bears up longer against life's hard- 
 ship. And sometimes, by a high chance, 
 the secondary drab thing is transanimate 
 and made other than itself; the insignifi- 
 cant glows with meaning ; the trivial becomes 
 great with wonders of suggestion. So a foul 
 pane will flame with red of opals against 
 the setting sun ; an iron swung against a 
 grate will chime like the Bourdon of Notre 
 Dame. 
 
 The 
 Second 
 Best. 
 
88 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 The half 
 heart. 
 
 " But," he who doubts may say, " I who 
 desire the purple distances and follow after 
 things delicate and intangible, how should I 
 hew this withered wood and draw this stagnant 
 water ? How should I practise a gross envy 
 for things unenviable of my soul ? How should 
 I rival Pandect, the man of Law, of Futurus 
 of the Exchange, or the ungentle scholar Pret- 
 erite ; how cope with Agricola, my country 
 neighbour, who lives intent upon byres and 
 barns, and is enraptured by a vision of fatted 
 cattle ? Shall I leave the glory of the far 
 heavens for the nice alignment of a furrow, or 
 forget the aerial thought, reckoning a crass 
 weight of swine ? I could not, for Nestor's 
 counsel, compete for prizes or for solidities of 
 profit ; as well bid me prefer to Turner's skies 
 the earth-loving heavens of a Dutchman's land- 
 scape." M Protest, but try," the counsellor 
 will answer ; the hour comes — you will wonder 
 at its swift feet — when the lawyer's reputation 
 will be to you for a reproach, and the scholar's 
 name for an incitement ; when your sleep will 
 be troubled by the desire to outcultivate 
 
J 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 89 
 
 Agricola, and the fingers too delicate for rough 
 use will tingle for a grasp of his plough. While 
 the envy endures, the poppies in the corn and 
 the sorrel in the hay will be to you no more, 
 as in enchanted hours, the final cause of all the 
 field ; but as base weeds to the farmer, marring 
 all the prospect of good harvest. Therefore 
 indulge clean envy well ; let it run out its course. 
 These jealousies and fervours are healthful for 
 you ; they counter the detachment to which you 
 were else abandoned ; you were in a fair way 
 towards madness ; they will keep you human. 
 The things that awaken them have not, be it 
 confessed, the virtue of the true gods or the 
 perdurable ; yet they are useful idols of a mean- 
 while ; they will possess the mind until the 
 lodestar shines again. They shall hold your 
 spirit to such an exacting round as most you 
 need, averting it from wild thoughts and the last 
 irreligion of despair. When the song sounds 
 to you again, and the shadow of the gnomon 
 falls once more upon the hour of divine impos- 
 sible things, you shall not soar or dream the 
 worse for this service in the house of bondage ; 
 
 The half 
 heart. 
 
9° 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The half 
 heart. 
 
 The 
 
 Unknown 
 
 Worse. 
 
 nor, when the flight ends, shall the mind have 
 aught but benefit from that alternation of 
 concern amid sound things coveted and prac- 
 tised. What if it be never yours to seek them 
 with a whole heart? Give what dimidiated 
 zeal you may, and bear with them in good faith 
 for their nearness to humanity. And though 
 sometimes they are done in a stupor, as a man 
 might labour the morning after ruin, or between 
 shocks of earthquake, this very insensibility 
 has charm. There is a pleasant recklessness 
 in desperate hours, which have their own 
 sufficiency, and may hold the spirit almost upon 
 the verge of happiness. 
 
 For without the common tasks and feasible 
 plain things of competition the world is too 
 hard for the Siren's bondman, who must wait 
 often in weariness for the return of the soul's 
 desire. The intervals between his joys are too 
 long for still endurance ; remoter sounds and 
 happenings of a life not truly shared become 
 intolerable to the spirit held motionless and 
 expectant ; it is in silence that the water mad- 
 dens, heard dripping upon the stone, in the 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 9 1 
 
 stillest night that the heart is frozen. Without 
 the anodyne of planned activity, he will be 
 drawn down into the gulf that yawns for him : 
 there will be nothing fixed and firm to stay 
 him, no handhold for his clutching fingers. In 
 the deeps to which then he falls there is exist- 
 ence, but not life ; there the infolded thoughts, 
 lost to all beyond, flock inward upon them- 
 selves ; or if one dash out for freedom, a swift 
 memory will head it back, as the shepherd's 
 fierce dog rounds in the sheep. There is no 
 release in swoon, for when consciousness 
 returns it flows more darkly, as to one fallen 
 asleep in the pain of evil tidings. At the 
 moment of such awakening, the heart is felt to 
 sink ; all sinks with it and falls, pressed beneath 
 a descending cloud of misery, down and ever 
 further down into those bottomless depths 
 where the soul implores annihilation and is not 
 answered. There is known the suspended fear 
 of the unknown Worse, which is before, behind, 
 and round about, an incalculable infesting 
 presence. The brain seems quickened for one 
 end only, to revolve misery ; in the dim light, 
 
 The 
 
 Unknown 
 
 Worse. 
 
9 2 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 The 
 
 Unknown 
 
 Worse. 
 
 Centrip- 
 etal 
 force. 
 
 the eye is aware of things moving, glimmering 
 forms of concealed but certain fear, " glancing, 
 shifting mortal woes " luminous with their own 
 faint and sinister light. And sometimes, in 
 the most dreadful hour, a lordlier form of terror 
 passes, formidable and slow, as the Angel of 
 the Abyss might fly over his gulf, and all sounds 
 be stilled but the beat of his darkening wings. 
 Tremendous hours, incommunicable between 
 soul and soul, unimaginable after escape as 
 tortures of other beings in a world remote from 
 ours, yet always near to many, high and low, 
 learned or without letters, to this man who 
 governs a State, or that man who goes about 
 a little business, and nearest of all to those 
 who have heard the Sirens' song. If there be 
 any labour which may avert these hours, God 
 bring it to the hand and send it done. 
 
 The victim who would not thus go under 
 must use his intervals in a fury and wrath of 
 action. He must use them with such fierce 
 diligence, that the work which he has to show 
 at the end may absolve him from the charge of 
 vanity. He must stifle his inner conviction 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 93 
 
 of an absurdness in these tasks, and win an 
 approval from the general judgment which may 
 never be accorded by his own, in secret won- 
 dering that any such things should avail, yet 
 illogically willing to be justified. He will not 
 have worked amiss if this his second best 
 appear his whole ambition, for he will have won 
 in spare hours a testimony of good service 
 which shall stand him in lasting stead ; he shall 
 be habilitated before others, and somewhat 
 ease, by a softly-cheating fallacy, the pain of 
 inachievement which gnaws within him. It is 
 well for him to have known the compelling 
 attraction of mankind, which, like the attraction 
 of earth for material things, is ever operative 
 upon the soul. For as the earth draws the 
 torn leaf, and will have it at last, however long 
 the winds toss it up or whirl it in the air, so 
 every soul yields to this indrawing strength, 
 which is an indefeasible power, constant as 
 gravitation itself, and as quietly exerted. The 
 wonderful path of man was made straight by 
 common deeds ; our forefathers inaugurated the 
 world's course with nothing better ; all through 
 
 Centrip- 
 etal 
 force. 
 
94 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Centrip- 
 etal 
 force. 
 
 In ipsis 
 floribus. 
 
 the ages they strove with each other, doing, 
 getting and exchanging, by concussion and 
 hard argument of life no less than by its friendli- 
 ness, joined indissolubly to each other. Often 
 the strife was violent, but it welded ; there was 
 chaos, but the good ground formed ; it solidi- 
 fied ; it has remained. In the underworld of 
 forgotten time the fancy sees customs and 
 beliefs overlie and mingle with each other ; it 
 is as if, in a dream of creation, you watched 
 the earth molten, and strata of ancient rocks 
 flow to their first repose. The plain forces 
 worked out their way ; the world settled to plain 
 life ; it is so that humanity was shaped into its 
 greatness. Our common days continue the old 
 heroic effort ; who would not drudge between 
 two dreams for a share of them ? 
 
 Happy is the life which is not uttered all in 
 parenthesis, but spoken out full in rounded 
 periods. It is amenable in the hour of weari- 
 ness to the obvious and approved recreation. 
 Does he who lives it tire awhile of his unmemo- 
 rable activities? There are the reliefs of 
 nature, of art, of religion, each fashioned for his 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 95 
 
 convenience in usum deficientis. But the Sirens 
 do not permit any victim of theirs such light 
 release. Though he is exhausted to a faint- 
 ness, they will weigh out to him each remedy 
 of the worn soul as it were by the drachm and 
 scruple ; like the chirurgeon at the pulse of the 
 racked prisoner, they watch for the hour when 
 the heart shall prove of a torturable strength ; 
 and stinting it of rest to the last point of safety, 
 compel it to the hard assay once more. And 
 they are too fine to end the respite by any 
 visible brutality ; that does not assort with their 
 subtle purpose. They softly overcloud and 
 delicately blight, until the mind becomes aware 
 of a disillusion imparted it knows not whence 
 or how. Each mercy thins from its fullness into 
 a dissatisfying vapour, as if imperceptibly it 
 thwarted itself to serve them ; unconscious of 
 the process used upon him, the sufferer awakes 
 in a new strength, but with an abated confi- 
 dence. Neither religion, nor art, nor nature 
 is frank to him, but each has an insincerity of 
 second intent ; which he resents the more, in 
 that he went to them like a man foredone in a 
 
 In ipsis 
 floribus. 
 
 IH 
 
9 6 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 In ipsis 
 floribus. 
 
 great exhaustion, desperately trustful, and in 
 such evil case as only a malignance could 
 abuse. Nature herself is suborned against 
 him ; even in her plenary hour she inexplicably 
 fails, changing without seen cause the motherly 
 to the novercal face. In her festival of high 
 summer she prepares so many glories that the 
 mind is held rapt in one long pleasure of sur- 
 prise, until all suspicion is drowned in the bright 
 flood. Like healing like, this new enchant- 
 ment seems to prevail over the old ; the earth 
 laughs doubt away. The lime-tree is fragrant 
 on the air j the honeysuckle crowns the lustrous 
 holly and the briony the hedges ; the hop-bines 
 sway in the breeze, reaching out after each 
 other from pole to pole ; in the cottage gardens 
 the great lilies ranged before the larkspurs 
 image the white clouds upon the sky above 
 them. Invisible gnats keep a sustained mur- 
 mur above ; a distant wain makes for the barn 
 behind which the fresh-ploughed land runs 
 back, like a faintly rippled sea bounding a 
 peninsula of trees. All floats on the summit 
 and crest of full perfection ; it is the ripe hour 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 97 
 
 of all things. No sign of autumn appears yet 
 among the leaves ; in the gardens the time of 
 the sad asters is far ; the nights have breathed 
 balm upon them after every sunset, and there 
 is still no breath of decay. Shall he believe 
 that Nature betrays him with a kiss of peace, 
 so that the mind forgets its warfare, living for a 
 while in a pathetic wonder, like a child used to 
 blows and suddenly caressed ? Yet she does 
 betray ; the Sirens teach her their art and force 
 her to do their bidding. And often she 
 must do it under that cloudless heaven in the 
 third hour after the meridian, which is the day's 
 autumn, the fatal hour, unbearably steeped in 
 sorrow. For then an English afternoon may 
 wear that evil brilliance of the tropic under 
 which men know themselves mocked, and the 
 heart is made empty, and despair flows into 
 the soul which love has left unguarded ; and 
 many, asked in what hour they have perceived 
 themselves most desolate and under Medusa's 
 eyes, would answer : " At this hour, and upon 
 a summer's day." By such an effluence of 
 pure sadness the cruel end is attained, and this 
 
 In ipsis 
 floribus. 
 
9 8 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 In ipsis 
 floribus. 
 
 The 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
 serene heaven is used as readily as the known 
 ministers of unrest, the unharboured clouds, or 
 fretting waves, or mists, or the broken silences 
 of pine-woods when the cones fall one by one. 
 The voice of the Sirens is of so divine a charm 
 that even the mother of all created things her- 
 self must do their pleasure. 
 
 VII 
 
 The Sirens can trouble all the healing wells, 
 even the deep well of Nature. The well of 
 Faith they disturb lightly; they know where 
 haunt the little breaths of sly heresy and noisier 
 gusts of schism which come suddenly down to 
 flaw it. The bright well of Art they also trouble, 
 causing it to shimmer from the deeps with a 
 multitude of springs that bubble out of the rock 
 and blurr the still reflections upon its face. 
 The painter must often yield to their voice; 
 even the sculptor may not always resist ; the 
 architect cannot but obey. But the musician 
 anticipates the song, and seems almost to 
 catch it upon their lips. For this is their own 
 art, and formidable indeed to all who confess 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 99 
 
 their sovereignty. In the perception of this 
 danger the Hellenes conspicuously proved their 
 insight, though they knew nothing of the bow, 
 by which the supreme magic passes into instru- 
 ments of strings. For them there was a peril 
 even in Terpander's lyre ; but what dread had 
 not been theirs if some god or hero had taught 
 them this last device ; if Apollo on Parnassus, 
 or Orpheus in the world of Shades, had drawn 
 the bow over the viol, as- Raphael and Signorelli 
 have portrayed them, unwilling to conceive 
 the heaven or the hell which could be charmed 
 without it. Music was never safe for enchanted 
 minds ; even for the mind subdued to custom 
 it may be rife with hidden menace. The 
 Hellene did not err when he sought to control 
 it always in bonds of language, suffering it to 
 range abroad only under guard of words, and 
 held always within the cold scrutiny of reason. 
 He feared the imploring harmonies which 
 entice into the measureless by measure, and 
 tempt the geometric mind out of its fastness. 
 Absolute music, freed, like a symphony, from 
 constraint of words, he denounced as an incal- 
 
 The 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
 culable and uncivic power. For he marked 
 the deceitful art begin with unassuming notes, 
 a march of smooth plastic forms made audible, 
 which seem at first to brace and temper the 
 spirit. But behind this stage he perceived 
 another, which threatened to destroy the man, 
 to waste away his spirit, and, in the phrase of 
 Plato, to cut out the sinews of his soul, until he 
 should decline into a feeble citizen and an 
 unvictorious warrior. Against these insidious 
 arts of decay he waged unremitted war. We 
 may smile at this strait philosophy, and at the 
 law which would sanction none but the Dorian 
 style ; for to-day an agora will not contain a 
 nation, nor may a people be corrupted in the 
 fleeting of an hour. We put our trust in size, 
 and ask safety of mere tumult, which subjects 
 all music to the distracting din of life. In the 
 market and the street, men cannot hear the fine 
 strain if they will ; securely multitudinous, 
 they go their ways ignorant of danger, and 
 whistling uncharmed melodies down the wind, 
 where all is merged with the echo* of traffic, or 
 dispute, or pastime. But withdrawn into some 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 still place in some moving hour, the individual 
 is yet imperilled ; and above all, he whom the 
 Sirens have taught to hear. For him the risk 
 is not less, but tenfold greater. For this art has 
 grown beyond the range of Greek imagination, 
 and the adventuring mind once thoroughly 
 searched by it can conceive no longer a limit to 
 its omnipotence. When the great musician of 
 modern Germany came to interpret the genius 
 of Beethoven, he found the master supreme in 
 this, that he had transported music beyond the 
 aesthetic beauty of rhythm and symmetry, away 
 into her proper sphere of the Sublime, where 
 the mere form is perceived subordinate and 
 is beaten down under her wings. For since 
 Beethoven, she soars out into high places 
 where the unaided reason is too short-breathed 
 to follow ; she speaks a language of divine 
 meaning and beyond competence of your ana- 
 lysing thought. In her kingdom there is no 
 tyrant's art of definition, no pedant's love of 
 marshalled concepts ; the reason may only pass 
 its borders exalted by the glow of spiritual fire. 
 How much more perilous is she thus become 
 
 The 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 The 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
 with the glamour of high philosophy about her 
 name, and herself, as a philosopher has said, 
 auricular metaphysic with incantation for half 
 her argument. Music is not safe for you, 
 followers of the Sirens ; look back and recall 
 the dangers into which in past years she has 
 beguiled you, and say if, in the knowledge of 
 her power, you would dare blindly to follow her 
 flight. Remember how in some hour when all 
 things have consented to a deep emotion, the 
 control of the very life was lost to you ; not a 
 blow could you have struck for freedom, as you 
 stood hearkening without help or counsel, 
 stilled to a voluptuous helplessness, drunken 
 with the joy of your bondage. Perhaps in some 
 crowded place your soul was clean taken from 
 your governance, or perhaps in the company 
 of one other only ; taken it was, and humbled 
 until it knew itself no more. As the moon rose 
 over the fields of harvest I have heard an 
 arpeggio struck by invisible hands, preluding 
 to a great music. In the succeeding pause all 
 the mysteries of the hour and place seemed 
 gathered for an inspiration ; at last the deep 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 I0 3 
 
 notes came quivering from the strings, and all 
 that the pent consciousness embraced was 
 dissolved into the relieving flood of sound. 
 Plaintive chords, undulant and joyous har- 
 monies, they flowed out from the brimming 
 chamber over lawns and paths, meeting the sigh 
 of night as it replied from the hushed, attend- 
 ing forest. In such an hour what control was 
 left to the will, what discipline remained to 
 reason overwhelmed by the surge of infinite 
 divine things ? When the tide breaks, the dyke 
 of reason goes down like the ramparts of a 
 child's castle in the sand ; the set ordinances of 
 life are annulled ; the soul is drawn away on a 
 celestial pilgrimage ; the call of the Sirens has 
 been obeyed. Following paths of wonder, she 
 knows swift change of joy and suffering ; 
 she moves over the formless waters of the 
 uncreated, hovering in the heart of the void, 
 drinking the crimson wine of dawn and sunset. 
 Free, and glorying, and elate she wings over 
 the coasts of light ; she hears the waves break 
 far below her, and the winds moan by ; the won- 
 der of things vast and infinitesimal consumes 
 
 The 
 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
104 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
 her, as she floats dissolved in the trance of her 
 unincarnate passion. Under that enchant- 
 ment all the fabric of laws and religions and 
 philosophies is tossed away upon the wind, as 
 thistledown adrift over the meadows. Nothing 
 is fastheld more, or founded; all flows and 
 changes, descending, mounting, approaching, 
 withdrawn, in regions dark with austere shad- 
 ows, aglow with splendours of inapprehensible 
 light. They who once adventure where these 
 things are, would never exchange the starry 
 ways for the firm ground of earth, or the cloud- 
 walls for its bonded masonries, or for its most 
 assured rewards, the superb impossibilities of 
 hope. When certain harmonies encompass 
 them, they are severed from the world ; at each 
 return the fiery particles of the soul are stirred 
 more deeply. This influence is an affection of 
 elements ; its power is ultimate, it abides. The 
 Russian mystic was not alone among thinkers 
 who in our day have shared the dread which 
 disturbed the ancient world. But he has 
 described the terror, well, confessing that the 
 music which he had so loved in youth became 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 105 
 
 at last an art of arcane power, and awful to 
 him in contemplation. His mind misgave him 
 for the dread of it. He feared with a more 
 than Hellenic fear. 
 
 By mastery of such an art, aggrandised to a 
 new scope, the Sirens are now advantaged in 
 the onset. It is the first preparation of their 
 spell ; scarce are the words of the magic framed, 
 when already the soul is a yielded prey. They 
 sing to these new harmonies the old sweet 
 cajoleries and bitter taunts. " What part have 
 you in the reaped earth, children of the divine 
 unrest ? Would you turn from us now ? would 
 you pretend forgetfulness ? You on whose ears 
 the great charm fell, have done with vile con- 
 tent ! These among whom you hide are 
 deceivers of their own souls, gilding the grey 
 lead for gold. Come forth from among them, 
 come forth far ; ascend to sight ; know ecstasy, 
 and moments as the lit foam of time. Know 
 daring ; love the inordinate hope ; unswathe the 
 soul ; arise. About you murmurs the unuttered 
 life which might be spoken, the imprisoned life 
 which might be free, the obedient life which 
 
 The 
 Sirens' 
 own art. 
 
 The song 
 renewed. 
 
io6 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The song 
 renewed. 
 
 need not serve. Have no lot with serfs. Let 
 the thought leap out; shake from you all that 
 clings ; fling off the encumbering folds. Come ; 
 for these are cowering and remiss natures, 
 clusterers, afraid alone ; slow-thighed bees, 
 clogged with their own honey, forgetful of the 
 tree-tops, insects of the tended hive. Come 
 forth from them ; they are blind to joy ; their 
 life is a dupery, their love a straitening. Let 
 them go in the rote of the nether ease ; let them 
 piece out cloying happiness; their days are a 
 dust and bestowed in vanity ; the world wastes 
 the ages. Disdain their restless round, and 
 come far ; as the bird whirrs from the low 
 grass, come out upon the great winds, clean as 
 the breath of seas. For a while, when our 
 voices were not heard, it was permitted to you 
 to share their foolishness, to revolve for their 
 pleasure and cheat sorrow with speed, to be the 
 toy of their solemn pastime. The top sleeps 
 upon the point ; while the game lasts, it is well. 
 But now we are come again, singing low and 
 clear and nigh you, cease and look cloudward. 
 For now the dreamed Better Thing appears, 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 107 
 
 and you shall win to it ; from false goals and 
 dull aims misrevered you shall depart, you shall 
 soar out till you look down upon the hillock 
 Olympus. Know this, that more worth is lost 
 by peace than by passion. The quickening joy 
 scathes, but have pride of your scars ; that 
 which has not suffered does not know ; the 
 unwounded have not lived. Come forth, trust 
 no sanctuary ; you are ours, and neither shrine, 
 nor fortalice, nor uttermost dark retreat shall 
 divide us from our own. Though you are 
 carried from the verdure and the bloom, and the 
 thickets thronged with birds; though all be 
 gone which assuaged this servitude, gentleness 
 and kind looks and caring voices, yet be not 
 dismayed ; for we will take the need of them 
 from your heart and set your desire upon nobler 
 sounds and presences. Would you shrink back 
 because men say that to approach the immortal 
 is to endure more pain ? And were it even so, 
 what argument that for noble natures? All 
 that is noble grows in pain ; as it ever was, so 
 it shall be ever, till Fate get eyes or be tamed 
 to pity. Come then to the life emulous and 
 
 The song 
 renewed. 
 
io8 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The »ong 
 renewed. 
 
 An 
 immortal 
 Sophistry. 
 
 uncrowned ; is there no pleasure of upward 
 strife, is not the supreme thing far and half- 
 discerned more than the near conspicuous 
 vanity ? If life were a haunting of quiet and 
 green places, it should satisfy a heart, but a 
 bird's heart — if that were all of life. And if it 
 were a diligence of bearing loads, it would 
 suffice a mind, but an ant's mind — if that were 
 all. Absolute whole life is more than ease or 
 profit; it is an ascent and a transcending, it 
 evades ; it loves the outrance. He who cramps 
 it in the press dishonours it with unfair misuse. 
 We touch you with shafts of golden sound ; cling 
 to your safe mean no more, but come where the 
 high strains wander ; where the free life wins 
 glory of health, and the pest of ordinance is 
 overcome ; where the unwarded soul, without 
 sentinel or patron, is proven in the great space 
 alone. Come forth from among them, chil- 
 dren of Divine unrest ; you on whose ears the 
 great charm fell, have done with vile content." 
 With such words they provoke the spirit, 
 interfusing through the wild music their own 
 irresistible self. And the bondman rises to 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 109 
 
 obey, as Odysseus rose, though long years have 
 gone by since last they sang to him. He obeys, 
 knowing in his heart they lie, but like the wild 
 thing captured, unable to contrive his deliver- 
 ance. He knows that happiness, his birthright, 
 is rapt from him by a sleight of immortal 
 sophistry ; he knows that the song of freedom 
 cozens, and the singers themselves are bond, 
 compelled by a fate which calls for ruin of men. 
 With whatever charm they sing, with what 
 promises soever they entice, whatsoever disgust 
 with present things their voice may instil, in the 
 very hour of capitulation some instinct yet w^ill 
 tell him that the unmysterious fond things are 
 best, the things of every day, that they alone 
 nourish life, that he was only born to love them. 
 He must rise ; he must follow. Yet among all 
 who obey the call, scarce one but would not 
 liever remain, might he pause to cast a balance 
 and measure the need of his own humanity. 
 But no briefest respite is accorded ; he is swept 
 away too fast for the saving calculation. There- 
 upon all regret for the broken ties pales first 
 to affectionate contempt and then to cold 
 
 An 
 
 immortal 
 Sophistry. 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 An 
 immortal 
 Sophistry. 
 
 The 
 poison of 
 Nonacris. 
 
 oblivion, as joy eclipses happiness, and every 
 memory of calm delights is lost in the splendour 
 of its appearing. 
 
 For the voices come, as to one imprisoned at 
 a desk memories of shore or moorland, per- 
 verting the mind from every covenant of duty. 
 When they are abroad, interflowing with the 
 sounds of life, all that was solid and firm dis- 
 solves, all pomp and consequence is as a 
 shadow. While that music still trembles in the 
 air, how vain the homily of the Industrious 
 Apprentice who rose to claim a place upon the 
 dais, and sat in a carved chair, an exemplar to 
 unadventuring souls. For such moralities 
 there is then no room ; who follows whither the 
 Sirens call is lost to the rich promises of fortune 
 and shall find no promotion in the world. Lost 
 also to things less dispensable than these, 
 stayed from gladness, diminished in the heart's 
 virtue. For the roots which the heart throws out 
 to others are weakened and die back; instead 
 of a commingling, there is at first an uncertain 
 touch ; at last they wither, and search no longer 
 after the true food of their life. The heart 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 bewitched is made ungenial ; only the glad are 
 kind. Even the tried affection is dimmed ; and 
 slowly, as a stone weathers, the spirit darkens 
 from the old fidelities. Like the rule of some 
 rigid order, the service of the Sirens chills 
 human sympathy ; theirs is a sequestering law, 
 too strange to share with many. Every hour 
 of abandonment, each adventurous escape, 
 enfeebles the hold upon common life ; the 
 colours of love and dislike grow paler, as all is 
 said to pale when a long sickness draws to its 
 end, and the soul is near its passing. The sur- 
 face of the mind dulls like a mirror of silver 
 tarnished ; the reflections that once played over 
 it come no more ; it is estranged from the old 
 light and the moving images of the world. To 
 one thus inhumanly entreated, all men become 
 as travellers moving in the next room of the 
 inn, arriving and departing, brought nearer or 
 removed by a machinery of unshared indifferent 
 fates. His nature is slowly frozen ; a fatal 
 coldness rises in him, as from that icy poison 
 of Nonacris of which it is fabled that Alex- 
 ander died. 
 
 The 
 poison of 
 Nonacris. 
 
I 12 
 
 SIRENI C A 
 
 VIII 
 
 The bond 
 of wild 
 want. 
 
 An old religious writer has said that human 
 wants are the true ligatures between God and 
 man ; had we not wanted, we had never been 
 gratified ; we are bound by an infinite debt 
 because our needs are without end. There is 
 solace in this thought of the soul's need as 
 bond between the passing and the eternal life, 
 between that which yearns and that which satis- 
 fies ; it seems to cover unrest with a grace of 
 divine protection, and confute that evil old 
 doctrine of the Envy of the Gods. None who 
 have hearkened to the Sirens' music but will fol- 
 low the argument thus far. But they cannot 
 stay within the bound set by this man of fortu- 
 nate piety ; it is too near for their extravagance, 
 they must lend another meaning than his to 
 infinity of desire. For how should he know the 
 strange places of half-perception, the refuges of 
 the driven soul, the wastes of the outer light ? 
 The very name of infinity awed him ; his mind 
 shrank from the approaches of it ; he recked 
 too much of many things to be the true guide 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 113 
 
 of their audacity. The sheltered plats and bor- 
 ders of his parsonage were never planted with 
 herbs of magic ; they stood thick with old-world 
 flowers disposed about a dial, offering their 
 nectaries to the bees, stems to be plucked in a 
 quiet hour and set in a bowl of Delft among 
 piled folios of the Fathers. But the Sirens lead 
 the steps among blooms of another beauty, 
 such growths as sprang from the bewitched soil 
 in Virgil's garden of Avellino, and dangerous 
 in the gathering as the strange root man- 
 dragora. Wild wants, insatiable desires, these 
 also are bonds no less than the sanctioned 
 wish which in shamefastness receives its appor- 
 tioned gift. These also are of divine descent, 
 the Sirens say ; it may not be that they should 
 be disowned by any god. For what celestial 
 name but should lose nobility preventing these, 
 which bid the soul dare to forget her mortal 
 deference, to despise all gain, to leap out 
 beyond count of life and profit ? The sweet 
 sound comes, the spirit answers ; and all molec- 
 ular affairs are as the dust under a lee when a 
 great wind veers to scatter it. Then is the hour 
 
 The bond 
 of wild 
 want. 
 
H4 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The bond 
 of wild 
 want. 
 
 Happi- 
 ness and 
 Joy. 
 
 of quest after invisible perfections for ever 
 beyond seizure ; of joy rewarding the pursuit, 
 instant as swift flame and incomparable with 
 all other guerdons. Joy wild and pure born in 
 the purple of deep skies, consuming like a fire, 
 maddening like a potion, but of the stained 
 nature never known, from the common slave of 
 sense to Sardanapalus, Akyndaraxes' son. 
 
 With this joy the Sirens lure the impassioned 
 soul, now exquisitely troubled, and able no 
 more to abide in the calm ease which flows on a 
 curve and rounds to the full circle of content- 
 ment. With joy they charm her, the glory of 
 stars, the flower of the miraculous heaven. For 
 joy and happiness, confused in the thought of 
 men, are in truth of different kindred ; from their 
 very birth they are estranged ; the heart which 
 the one frequents is often abandoned by the 
 other. To joy the house of happiness is a kempt 
 place too trimly tended, ordered by unbearable 
 wonts of peace, shuttered and barred in too 
 close a privacy ; and all that is beyond its fire- 
 light is lost to it as the far side of the moon. 
 It seems a place of sedentary affections and 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 ii5 
 
 imperfect generosities ; the love which pours a 
 mild ray through its chambers is too placid for 
 ardent life. And to the happy, joy is a strange 
 vagrant spirit, and too wayward for their com- 
 pany, a haunter of brinks and perilous verges 
 which are not for guided feet. It passes, but 
 they keep close within ; none who would know 
 still days would unbar for such a visitant : a pro- 
 found instinct bids them fear it. Happiness 
 is all things to all men ; a thousand definitions 
 should not describe its nature. It is suffi- 
 ciency for the day ; it is the peace of the good 
 conscience; it is the virtuous use of intellectual 
 energies ; it is the wealth of nations ; it is any 
 heart's ease or all, if its range be but short and 
 its aim feasible. The happy are they who reach 
 their want, who achieve, who set hand to those 
 things only which are done utterly and to the 
 end, who complete their work in a good conceit 
 of their sufficiency. Their secret lies in the 
 sage limit of attempt and the assurance of swift 
 fulfilment. From Hesiod to Burns, all who 
 have sung happiness have gone to the country- 
 side for the exemplar of it, where the horizon of 
 
 Happi- 
 ness and 
 Joy. 
 
n6 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Happi- 
 ness and 
 Joy. 
 
 all work is near, and each task all feasible 
 and visibly completed. " What a fine life the 
 countryman's, who ploughs his field all day 
 with his pair of oxen, and at eve brings them 
 home and feeds them, and eats himself, and 
 sleeps soundly." The marrow of happiness is 
 in this strait activity ; the unknown Italian of 
 the fifteenth century who put it so, set forth the 
 truth for all ages ; the aphorist did but para- 
 phrase when he said that he is happy who is fit 
 for one thing only, and does it. Light are the 
 footsteps of the Hours which have their ways 
 in the furrows ; this was well sung, O Hellene ; 
 no feet have moved lighter, or perhaps shall 
 move while man loves a harvest. For the 
 scattered seed grows and ripens, it is reaped 
 and threshed ; the foreseen gift is present and 
 the long labour crowned. Raise the plane of 
 life, change the occupation ; something in all 
 whole satisfaction will still tell of the old 
 Georgic straitness. Happiness is the use that 
 wears patiently to a comfort ; it is the habit of 
 the heart's ease ; it moves upon the path which 
 millions have trodden smooth. But joy is 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 117 
 
 elate, immoderate, ungovernable ; it flies, and 
 is uncontained within any bound. Happiness is 
 current gold ; worn in the markets and multi- 
 plied in transaction. Joy is neither weighed nor 
 minted ; its revenues are beyond exchange, 
 visionary treasures of desire laid up in the 
 clouds and eternally unimparted. Happiness 
 is still a wine ; there is a fume upon joy, which 
 seethes in the cup and is beaded about its 
 brim ; the draught of it exalts the soul of him 
 who drinks, until the world falls far from him as 
 the earth below rapt Ganymede ; he looks down, 
 and the great globe is gone from beneath him 
 like a thing rejected. Happiness is of a hempen 
 texture; joy is woven of the stuff of dreams; 
 it shall be rent by the lightest wing that flutters, 
 of so fine a gossamer is its substance. Joy 
 is of instants, born and dead in one darting 
 point of time ; happiness is of hours, and com- 
 pleted upon the long rounds of leisure. Hap- 
 piness is of silver afternoons. The mother of 
 joy is night ; it wells golden out of the dark- 
 ness ; it is auroral, it cometh in the morning. 
 Its voice rings like the bells which bear its 
 
 Happi- 
 ness and 
 Joy. 
 
n8 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 Happi- 
 ness and 
 Joy. 
 
 name. In a moment it is rung out upon the 
 dull world ; it calls to far winds and rides upon 
 them into the distance ; it returns, and the pro- 
 found air is Tumorous with the gathering music. 
 Sometimes, upon a day of festival, you may hear 
 the ringers mass their rippling peal into sudden 
 intermitting chimes, each flung upon the air in 
 one sonorous fall, a cataract of sound that 
 breaks upon the city and races far over its 
 roofs, until at last the intervals are lost, and all 
 is tremulous with echoes, flying, following, and 
 overtaken. The high tower rocks to the toss- 
 ing bells ; the mind is shaken with pulsing of 
 delight. Could joy flow suave as happiness, 
 who would not abandon all for it ? Nothing 
 but this were then the world's desire. But the 
 magical wild power is fitful and unsustained ; 
 it troubles and alarms ; hearts are not healed 
 but seared at its touch, and the bereaving hours 
 which end that rapture are often grey with deso- 
 lation. It sets aflame, and roaring out its life, 
 leaves ember and ash to die down in a freezing 
 night. In this dread usage it does not spare 
 or attemper ; the fierce change rives at the very 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 119 
 
 life, which is worn down by them and at each 
 return diminished. In tropic mountains, where 
 night frosts follow upon the glare of raging suns, 
 the peaks are splintered by the fury of the suc- 
 ceeding heat and cold. Fragments fall from 
 them in the high solitudes ; their flanks are 
 scarred with wounds ; more is reft in short years 
 from their adamantine substance than in quiet 
 centuries from the slopes of English hills. 
 
 What virtue, then, has this unsteadfast crea- 
 ture that it should rival happiness ? It is vari- 
 ous and rich in change and is so commended 
 to mutable humanity. Its transience quickens ; 
 the nature grows more sensitive to fine subtle- 
 ties of transformation, and is enriched, as by 
 an art of delicate experience. The mere passing 
 in or passing out becomes in itself such a 
 delight as the steady follower of happiness, in 
 his plain issues and returns, perhaps may never 
 know. Without warning given, in the dreariest 
 hour there steals upon the mind a sense of 
 strain relaxed ; a film draws over it ; all softens 
 and is clothed with colour. It is an amnesty, 
 a sudden glory of release, as when the iron 
 
 Happi- 
 ness and 
 Joy. 
 
 Peri- 
 pheral 
 things. 
 
S I R E N I C A 
 
 Peri- 
 pheral 
 things. 
 
 Arctic ground yields to the sun of spring, and 
 is pierced with the tender roots of flowers. 
 These gliding passages of sense come at last 
 to be desired for themselves ; they have a sev- 
 eral existence and awaken their own delight. 
 No longer dreaded as vain delays, they add to 
 joy a certain sweetness of suspense, like the 
 false dawn which checks the day to make it 
 fairer. The day comes at last, more beautiful 
 for the prelude ; so joy breaks and flows free 
 through things, quickening the soul with a more 
 marvellous flame. And joy, being vast in range, 
 makes the athlete soul ; for it summons to 
 divine hardship and leads into the far-unfolding 
 spaces entered of none save those stripped of 
 paraments and trinkets. He who would find 
 it must penetrate the heart of deserts not to be 
 crossed by the encumbered spirit. " Nudos 
 amat Eretnus" said St. Jerome ; and there is but 
 one truth for the saint and the bewitched. In 
 these great spaces, where joy is made manifest, 
 the Soul is central to a horizon upon all sides 
 remote, yet felt as an immediate and embracing 
 presence ; the void that divides her from it is 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 121 
 
 lit with a familiar splendour. On the borders 
 of immensity she is searched by influences 
 fresh from the spring of days, streaming in upon 
 her and meeting, as it were, in a foam of light. 
 This far-sent radiance becomes her life ; by the 
 magic of it she is drawn away from earth, from 
 care, from home and kindred. All loveliness 
 flows away into unattainable things ; these only 
 are vital to her ; for these alone she cares to 
 live. The sense and reason are fused in a 
 strange passion, revealed at last as that "light 
 intellectual fulfilled in love " which is the 
 supreme boon of mind. 
 
 Such love of far peripheral things is their 
 help whom the Sirens have sent wandering 
 away beyond the pales of happiness. It is often 
 poured first into the heart by a half-uttered 
 voice of nature, learned upon the sea, made 
 actual by a journey into wildernesses. The 
 sense of this strange union is bracing as keen 
 air ; there is a sharpness upon it as of the early 
 spring; its offspring are born in danger and 
 endure but a little while, like the crocus-flowers 
 aflame under the clenched unsheltering buds. 
 
 Peri- 
 pheral 
 things. 
 
 "Dalle 
 piu altt 
 stelle." 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 " Dalle 
 piu alte 
 stelle." 
 
 This farness of descent, this affinity with the 
 distance as the one thing needful, absorbed 
 the mind of Michelangelo ; it is the gospel of 
 his poems. With a persistence born of reve- 
 lation, he tells it in phrases uneasily combined, 
 labouring at an art which was not his own, 
 chiselling painfully at the words which resist 
 him to the end like granite. Often the springs 
 of fancy seem to fail him ; he repeats to weari- 
 ness his similes of ice and fire. But the mes- 
 sage is clear at last ; the sense breaks through 
 with a concise and noble utterance : " from the 
 stars of the uttermost height comes the splen- 
 dour down ; to these it draws the heart's desire ; 
 this is that which is named love.' , In these 
 lines his faith is all confessed ; his soul is eased 
 of a burden ; he has said the say for which he 
 believed the sculptor called to become a poet. 
 They shine through the obscure approaches 
 like the light of altars down glooming aisles ; 
 they bring the gold of daffodils into a chamber 
 dark with winter. These words have comfort 
 when sadness or privation of joy troubles the 
 enchanted spirit; when, too rapt even to love, 
 
SIRENICA 
 
 123 
 
 it is driven beyond the ways of happiness, 
 or goes aside, reluctantly averse, from the 
 hearths of consolation. Their echoes impart 
 new steadfastness ; like the Lucretian strain 
 to which they bear affinity, they rebind in 
 a high allegiance. At such times, it is with 
 them as with the traveller, when in the 
 charmed night-silences he sits alone under 
 eastern stars. The dearest memory grows 
 pale to him then as the moonlit sands; and 
 whatever fulfilment life holds is summed in 
 that perfected hour of solitude. As in some 
 exercise of skill a man cares no more for 
 rudiments when once he is advanced toward 
 mastery, but is intent only upon the diffi- 
 cult and subtle problems of the game, so he 
 who is estranged from near affections is blest 
 in delicate and faintest contacts to which only 
 the trained sense may make some imperfect 
 answer. He is environed of things, exquisite 
 and starry. He seeks that which is beyond 
 plain apprehension and yet suffers pursuit ; he 
 is impassioned at a light breath, as the poplar 
 quivers when all other trees are still. The 
 
 "Dalle 
 piu altt 
 stellc." 
 
124 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 "Dalle 
 piu altt 
 stelU." 
 
 spark falls ; the life grows quick ; it flames out 
 its ecstatic hour. For the desire of intellectual 
 beauty, however tenuous it seem, is passion 
 still ; a violence, a force, a fury, a vibration. It 
 descends from the clouds; like the Love of 
 Sappho's unforgotten verse, it comes to the 
 earth in purple ; it pulses with life as it comes. 
 Transitory it may be, unabiding, unknown, and 
 never all possessed. Yet such is the high 
 charm, that its memory lives when all else dies ; 
 it shall endure through the greater pain and 
 overpass the profounder gulf ; they who obey 
 it may not be tempted by a more certain wage 
 to another service. Though they suffer more 
 and longer, the reward is worth the anguish ; 
 and they would not change its moment for a 
 thousand placid morrows of fruition. For them 
 the glow which is intense and perfect is never 
 of the foreground ; it is like fire of sunset 
 among the hills, where the best is always furth- 
 est, and upon the last verge of sight. The near 
 range holds its several shapes and colours, with 
 fields, trees, and farms yet all distinct ; the 
 second yields up its varied hues and forms, and 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 125 
 
 looms unfeatured, steeped to the extreme rims 
 in azure shadows ; from the third the darkness 
 and the mass are already gone, and all is dis- 
 solved in pearly light. But beyond, the last 
 range lifts peaks that burn like topaz, now seen, 
 now hidden again, as the clouds move about it, 
 molten in a surge of fire. Such is the loveliness 
 which their souls pursue, ethereal, apparitional ; 
 and even so it passes, lost in an amazing con- 
 fluence of splendours before which a nearer 
 cloud spreads at last its darkening veil. 
 
 Joy works alone ; it asks no contribution ; 
 it avoids the pomps and standards, and all the 
 unneeded, vain necessities of spoiled lives. 
 The solitary place is sufficient for its habitation ; 
 it is freed, as the Stoics would have said, from 
 the tyranny of external things. It does not 
 recede, like happiness, with lost friends or van- 
 ished youth, when the ways of life darken to 
 the bereaved, like deep lanes poured full with 
 evening shadows. They who have known it 
 once may possess it always. For them there 
 shall be no sadness of surrender, but that 
 ecstasy of endeavour shall be prolonged to the 
 
 "Dalle 
 piu alte 
 sidle." 
 
 Joy 
 steadfast. 
 
126 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Joy 
 
 steadfast. 
 
 Joy 
 fugitive. 
 
 end. They shall not see the pleasures which 
 they have loved come down like autumn leaves, 
 or sigh over the meagre cheer of age, remem- 
 bering lost activities. For the tree of their life 
 shall not slowly rust to dull hues, but flush to 
 a swift splendour in the woods of autumn, until 
 at last it is absorbed into one clear flame, as 
 though it should not die, but glow into annihi- 
 lation. While the mind performs its office, and 
 the wedlock of body and soul holds undis- 
 solved, there shall still be scope for dreams not 
 unimpassioned, the soul shall yet be quickened 
 with the unquenchable fire. So long as the 
 eye has light, the heart shall yet be enamoured 
 of arduous hopes, as in the blazing days of 
 manhood. And in the distance there shall be 
 surer glimpses of that which youth but half 
 perceived ; the things which were invisible but 
 not vain shall seem now to pause for them, the 
 flash shall linger; a steadfast sight shall per- 
 ceive the vision. 
 
 Yet, as in wonder-tales the most splendid 
 gift of the magician is often granted upon some 
 hard terms, not hidden or kept back by the 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 127 
 
 giver, but forgotten awhile by the receiver in 
 the bravery of first possession, so it has ever 
 been with this gift of joy. It is lit with starry 
 lights and touched with amazing fires ; but it 
 remains of a supernal nature beyond their 
 expression or control; it is ever to be redeemed 
 by pain. None shall summon it at will, or keep 
 it continually under guard ; it will not outstay its 
 hour even for tears or passionate supplication. 
 It has not that great selfless quality which 
 makes happiness seem best when most divided ; 
 it is incommunicable, and may not be shared 
 at will with others. Only souls of an imperial 
 genius may bid it abide or persuade it to return 
 when they list; for them alone will it consent 
 to linger under the regard, as they follow from 
 height to height, proving the wings of the soul. 
 A Shelley or a Schubert will come radiant to 
 earth with it, and holding it visible awhile, send 
 it homing to the stars where, by the gods' grace, 
 he came upon it ; a Wordsworth draws it into 
 the circle of his hills and gives it rest in the 
 arbour of a cottage garden. These wizards had 
 some word of power with which to call it down, 
 
 Joy 
 fugitive. 
 
128 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Joy 
 
 fugitive. 
 
 The 
 recipe of 
 fern seed. 
 
 potent as charms of old magic, Agla, or Anani- 
 zapta, or Tetragrammaton the Unutterable 
 Name ; they knew some spell by which it should 
 seem to be imparted ; for them alone it out- 
 stayed the cockcrow and knew serene hours of 
 day. But for all the rest there is no such high 
 control ; the music out of the spheres escapes 
 them when most they love it ; the starry form 
 is consumed away in a quick jealousy of dark- 
 ness. Yet even the residue is riches ; that 
 which fleets from sight is steadfast in remem- 
 brance. There is pleasure from the flying 
 shadows of clouds upon the fields, though none 
 may trace their outline, or stay them for a 
 moment as they pass. 
 
 The Sirens are cruel mistresses, yet often 
 royal in largesse. They teach the spirit to beat 
 off beleaguering circumstance ; they discover 
 to it sovereign simples against oppression, dit- 
 tany for great wounds and infallible charms of 
 fernseed. The soul to which they call will travel 
 on the prompting of an instant ; it can be out 
 and away while others only dream of stirring ; 
 before heavy lids are rubbed, it is departed. It 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 129 
 
 knows no frontiers which might bar escape ; 
 it observes the will of none, and waits the 
 hazards of no caprice. In a well-known pas- 
 sage, Sterne has told how literature could carry 
 him far from the sad ways of life ; how, in a 
 moment, when the path became too rough or 
 steep for his feet, he was off it upon soft lawns 
 and places scattered with rosebuds of delight. 
 Such deliverance the Sirens also promise ; and 
 if in the regions whither they entice, the flowers 
 are flames and the lawns immeasurable fields 
 of space, there is the same elation of escape, 
 there is the same joy over the filed gyves left 
 behind. They sweep away the ambitions which 
 conflict with freedom or make subservient to a 
 patronage ; the soul which they have taught to 
 dream shall take no heed of jealous judgment ; 
 the treasures which it enjoys are of a divine 
 abundance and beyond the talons of the 
 harpies. It avoids the torment of Reputation, 
 besieged upon its pinnacle, and, like that priest 
 of Nemi, torn hourly by fear of the supplanter, 
 who shall creep through the grove, and cut the. 
 golden bough, and take the priesthood at 
 
 The 
 recipe of 
 fernseed. 
 
i3° 
 
 SIRENI C A 
 
 The 
 recipe of 
 fern seed. 
 
 The 
 
 shadow 
 
 of the 
 
 Abiding. 
 
 the point of the sword. It does not listen in 
 an anguish for the footstep of the challenger, 
 or by a sick fancy call down defeat out of the 
 void. It never knows the dwindling of men's 
 applause and slow withdrawal of favour, feared 
 as a woman fears the loss of an acclaimed 
 beauty, and defended, as she defends, by 
 pathetic artifices of self-deception, until some 
 quick brutality of chance tells that all was done 
 in vain. They who have never known praise 
 are spared this sadness ; on this stage they were 
 not engaged ; they do not hang upon an audi- 
 ence or watch their fortunes cruelly tossed upon 
 a sea of faces. 
 
 The Roman, tired of the city, with its smoke 
 and din, and the oppression of all its riches, pre- 
 pared for himself a place of refuge in the 
 country where he might hear the fall of waters, 
 and look out upon blue, silent mountains. He 
 lived two lives, confessing that neither might 
 satisfy his nature ; his wheels devoured the road 
 between town and country, bearing him at the 
 headlong speed which alone could assuage his 
 fever. The Sirens' liegeman, when the hard 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 1 3 1 
 
 world oppresses, escapes into a refuge more 
 sure than Tusculan villa or Sabine farm, whence 
 the eye ranges over a vaster distance to heights 
 more arduous than Soracte: The life of man, 
 it has been said, has many lurking-coigns and 
 deep recesses ; more often than we know it is 
 doubly lived by seeming simple men, because 
 the Sirens have come unawares and changed 
 them wholly. The character that we deemed 
 transparent is made impenetrable ; parents 
 grow opaque to children, husband to wife, and 
 friend to friend. They fashion to themselves 
 deep secrets which the eyes of Argus should 
 never find. The habitation of their soul is as 
 a house hung with concealing tapestries, and 
 pierced with many posterns invisible to the 
 stranger or even the guest ; but when these are 
 gone, the arras is lifted up, a stone revolves in 
 the wall, and the wind in the hidden stairway 
 calls to freedom. When others think that a 
 soul lodged after this wise keeps the hearth, 
 often it is leagues away, on seas or mountains 
 or in the forests where no axe has ever sounded. 
 There it follows things fugitive and swift, fleeter 
 
 The 
 
 shadow 
 
 of the 
 
 Abiding. 
 
132 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 The 
 
 shadow 
 
 of the 
 
 Abiding. 
 
 than hart or hare, and of a more infinite 
 endurance ; there it tastes the proven delight 
 of a servitude exchanged, for it serves still, 
 but now aerial and winged powers. And though 
 the wanderer in these wild places may lose the 
 comfortable shelter of circumscription, he is no 
 more encompassed or impounded ; he has 
 leaped the enclosures of that life where eyes are 
 focussed to one length, and slow to perceive 
 at every other. It may be peace to ignore 
 immensity and dwell within a fold ; to build a 
 sanctuary, and at appointed times to circumam- 
 bulate its walls ; to leave the infinite to the care 
 of sworn interpreters. Achievement it may be to 
 saw out measured lengths of fact, and with dove- 
 tail and rebate to complete the cunning joinery. 
 But those have been once allured beyond the 
 workshop and the chapel, distrust the peace 
 and mislike the carpentry. They abstain from 
 the deep cups of induction with which the 
 world's thirst is quenched. " It is brief," they 
 say, "this little nonce of life, but not too short 
 for brave adventure. Though we forsake the 
 sure prospect, who shall prove it madness ? 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 i33 
 
 For who shall tell us which is best, to know the 
 transient well, or to follow after the shadow of 
 the abiding ? " 
 
 The wanderer knows a more generous wine 
 than the thin vintage of Abiezer ; and the spice 
 in it is the joy of truancy, which outlasts the 
 days of youth and is inextinguishable in all to 
 whom the Sirens have ever sung. The man 
 remembers with delight how in boyhood he 
 would steal afield on a summer night to chase 
 moths along the hedges, exalted under the 
 influence of the bland moonlight, drawn into 
 mysterious distances by a charm beyond the 
 vision of fluttering wings or the desire of a diffi- 
 cult prey. How the great moth would appear 
 not at all, or only under a waned moon, gleam- 
 ing high above his net, and never for his seiz- 
 ure ; how he would find himself far from home, 
 when the night began to fail and the shadows 
 under the boughs gave back before the dawn ; 
 how he would race home on feet drenched with 
 dews, and sleep like a young god exhausted. 
 A mystery breathes to him still out of those 
 suave nights, so vast, so delicately haunted, 
 
 Truancy. 
 
134 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 Truancy. heavy with the fragrance of the meadow-sweet, 
 with the whirr and subdued murmur of soft 
 wings ; nights of the dreamy fields and silent 
 paths, when the pursuer was taken himself in an 
 enchantment, and winged himself, and lifted 
 up to an unimaginable rapture. Somewhat of 
 that joy survives to all who are held in the 
 allegiance of the Sirens ; they are always truant 
 in soul ; through the long days they may obey 
 the punctualities of rule, and keep the statutes 
 of observance, but their hearts are in the ghostly 
 meadows where the great moth hovered and 
 was never taken. He who thus outwardly con- 
 forms is fast vowed to errantry; the desire of 
 it is inveterate in him ; for the secret joy of it 
 he lives aloof in a seeming poverty of affection. 
 A weak competitor for all solid gains, but in 
 the retrospect at the end of life perhaps in bet- 
 ter case than Amurath the Caliph, who in age 
 looked back on a career of royal opportunity 
 and knew but fourteen days of happiness. The 
 memories of those great escapes shall come to 
 him in the still chambers where he sits impris- 
 oned ; they shall not find him mute to them, 
 
SI RENICA 
 
 135 
 
 but like a violin of the Amati, he shall grow 
 more resonant with years, and at the end take 
 up the master-theme ; it shall return with nobler 
 harmonies ; his soul shall stir to its departure 
 upon that sound. 
 
 Truancy. 
 
 IX 
 
 No god is dead who ever won an enduring 
 worship. Evil or good, mild or terrible, all must 
 live on ; it is not given them to die. The timid 
 pagan erred who told of a voice over the waters 
 crying: "Great Pan is dead." Hephaestus forges 
 dread arms ; Athena governs ; Aphrodite roams 
 the world, and Our Lady of the Wild Creatures. 
 And the nature which is half divine is also 
 immortal ; Herakles girds to new labours ; 
 Prometheus toils for men ; the Muses are still 
 present deities. Let none, therefore, wonder 
 that the ancient enemies of the Nine live also ; 
 for if Pan signifies all nature, the Muses and 
 the Sirens together mean all art, and the Sirens 
 alone romance. And therefore policy has feared 
 them, and all the deedful and strenuous ener- 
 
 No more 
 
 dead than 
 
 Pan. 
 
136 
 
 SIRENICA 
 
 No more 
 
 dead than 
 
 Pan. 
 
 gies have rallied for their undoing. Philoso- 
 phers have preached and good men practised 
 to compass their destruction. Religion has 
 been fain to save their victims from themselves 
 with the murmur of her liturgies. And yet they 
 are not silenced, nor are their victims saved. 
 For all who have heard the song to its end are 
 marked for wanderings as surely as the returned 
 Odysseus, who visited the temples, and per- 
 formed his vows, but was none the less in 
 jeopardy for all his offerings, and died search- 
 ing he knew not what in the peril of the outer 
 seas. It may be that in comparison with the 
 great gods of War and Love and Wealth, the 
 Sirens are weak in retinue; but where once 
 their dart flies home it wounds perdurably, and 
 the weapon of Eros is a child's bow to theirs. 
 They spread before all eyes the royal colour 
 they love, the hue of the great distances and 
 the deep skies ; it passes into the texture of life, 
 and like the dye which the great waters might 
 not wash out, it holds ineradicable to the end. 
 And if their voice was full of peril in the youth 
 of the world, how fatally resistless now, when 
 
S I R E N I C A 
 
 J 37 
 
 they have added to the old spell new charms 
 drawn from all experience and the subtlest arts 
 of life, until it become the arch-music, binding 
 the soul from the first chords with enchainments 
 of perfect sound. What things were dreamed of 
 Xanadu or stolen from the heavens for Adonais, 
 what whispers breathed into enchanted flutes 
 or called out of haunted lands for Euryanthe, 
 all the promises which man has overheard in 
 the winds, or surprised in the night-watches, 
 these they have engrafted upon their own and 
 made integral with the former sorcery. Like the 
 hunter who slew the eagle with a shaft winged 
 from its own feather, they have used dreams of 
 men for the wounding of human kind. Only 
 the child of the gods, the divine changeling in 
 the cradle, may obey their call and approach the 
 vision, and yet have full part in a human happi- 
 ness. For the rest there is but the swift flash 
 of joy, coming from the darkness and return- 
 ing to it; or the gleam of that Intellectual 
 Beauty which to the poet was as the music of 
 the night-wind over the strings of an unfin- 
 gered lute. 
 
 No more 
 
 dead than 
 
 Pan. 
 
138 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 clouded 
 
 fire. 
 
 The song of the Sirens is sung with mastery : 
 they did not strive with the Muses in vain. 
 All that the rhetorician knows they know : to 
 magnify, to make significant, or to suppress, 
 that their cause may always seem the better. 
 They do not sing of the drear interludes 
 between sight and sight, or of the soul out- 
 stripped and fallen exhausted. They do not sing 
 of achievement betraying promise, or the 
 misery of affinities never joined. They leave 
 unsung the visions that blind, and the darkness 
 that dismays ; the grief, the abandonment, the 
 slowly murdering silences. They veil the clear 
 Hellenic light with wreaths of magical cloud. 
 But they sing the glory of the chase in enchanted 
 forests and the straining to the quarry over the 
 mountains ; of adventure, of ascent, of soaring 
 valiance, of Infinity brought to man's com- 
 pass ; of time and space annulled, the aeon and 
 the moment made one ; of the almightiness of 
 joy approaching the splendour of tremendous 
 thrones. These things they sing ; and whoso- 
 ever shall hear out their song shall hate as they 
 hate, and love as seems good to them, suffered 
 
SI RENICA 
 
 i39 
 
 only to hide under heaped memories, like seeds 
 beneath dead leaves, the little after-thoughts 
 and treasons which they have not deigned to 
 crush. Their bondman shall forsake Pheidias 
 for Scopas ; he shall ask of Shelley the tran- 
 scending forms which Sophocles saw and 
 renounced ; he shall desire above that which 
 is simple and august and still, the sonorous, the 
 moving, and the richly dyed ; he shall give up 
 his soul to the lure of divine impossible things. 
 The crystal classic thought shall satisfy him no 
 more ; through its clear shoals he shall see the 
 natural man j but what is that to him who has 
 looked into Eastern rubies and discerned his 
 angel there ? All this lucidity is false to him ; 
 it is barren and pale ; the glow and the wonder 
 are analysed away. It is his punishment and 
 his very grievous loss ; for whom the classic 
 spirit informs, it saves for happiness ; romance 
 has no like redemption. But the colour, and 
 the glow, and the clouded inward fire he must 
 have, though the pure line of beauty perish 
 under his eyes. He receives in place of the clear 
 good the inapprehensible gift, committing, in 
 
 The 
 
 clouded 
 
 fire. 
 
140 
 
 SIRENIC A 
 
 The 
 
 clouded 
 
 fire. 
 
 the sight of prudence, an ineffable folly of 
 exchange. But what if the clear be shallow, 
 and the sharpest facet of proof the most arrant 
 artifice ; if your precise, trimmed knowledge be 
 vain as lore of heraldry, exact in forms that 
 never were ; if the symbol confessed, the aspira- 
 tion, the dream, win nearer than your defi- 
 nitions to the beating heart of truth ? If all 
 that is drawn from penumbra into hard light is 
 only man's convenient fiction, were there not 
 some consolation then for the exchange which 
 prudence deems so mad ? If the Real lives 
 only in the Vague, should not the Sirens deserve 
 praise despite their cruelty, singing the eternal 
 truth, and the terror and dread joy that come to 
 the soul out of the deeps in which it dwells ? 
 Such doubt is ever goading him and all his 
 fellows in unrest. And whenever a prescience 
 of that returning song begins to trouble them, 
 they make answer to all who in compassion 
 would keep them from the way : " Let us alone," 
 they say ; " the pansy of the dune is more to 
 us than the ranged flowers along your walls. 
 We must go far where the hours are unimputed ; 
 
SIRENIC A 
 
 141 
 
 we must be harmed of light. We shall soar and 
 fall ; yet we shall have known joy of ascent, 
 and nothing shall take from us the remem- 
 brance. Say no more that this ecstasy is against 
 nature ; it is the very way of the soul. For she 
 was never wholly of the creation and is not to 
 be contained by its laws. Hers is a transcend- 
 ing spirit which is abused, forever constrained 
 to present things. And she is not least faith- 
 ful to her own nature when she disdains to be 
 held by them, passing for awhile into the limit- 
 less and untempered, out of which she came. 
 Let us go, then, without reproach ; a permitted 
 force carries beyond your happiness. But when 
 we return, once more defeated, we will again 
 seek to do your pleasure in gratitude for your 
 goodwill. For often when you might have 
 turned from us you have forgiven, endeavour- 
 ing to make us share that which you deem to 
 be the greatest good for men. When we are 
 released, we will toil with the most patient, 
 though there be not one among the least of you 
 but shall have greater satisfaction of his labour. 
 Only suffer us always to look for the sign and 
 
 The 
 
 clouded 
 fire. 
 
 II 
 
142 
 
 SIREN IC A 
 
 The 
 
 clouded 
 
 fire. 
 
 to depart upon its coming ; for when the mys- 
 tical wind stirs, and the music streams into these 
 shadows, then we must rise and go, though all 
 the mercy of earth were put forth to hold us 
 back." 
 
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