I had gathered
about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every
pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart,
individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the
triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the
firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for
which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my
world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their
own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other
moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except
the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this
thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow. All
those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturous
faces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities with
their passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair to
despair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part; and every
experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite,
would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never
know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the
one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had
heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but the
supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart
into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had
been from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical
apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me,
once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the _alembic_ to
the _athanor_ and laid the _lavacrum maris_ at their side,
I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from
the great deep where spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, are
weary; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the
consuming thirst for destruction which made the alchemist veil under
his symbols of lions and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and of
nitre, a search for an essence which would dissolve all mortal
things. I repeated to myself the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in
which he compares the fire of the last day to the fire of the
alchemist, and the world to the alchemist's furnace, and would have
us know that all must be dissolved before the divine substance,
material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dissolved indeed
the mortal world and lived amid immortal essences, but had obtained
no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these things, I drew aside the
curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my
troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky
were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour
continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies
into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my
mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of
letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate
spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many
dreams.