Malicious Angel, who still dost
My soul such subtile violence!
When music sounds, then changest thou
A silvery to a sultry fire:
Nor will thine envious heart allow
Delight untortured by desire.
Through thee the gracious Muses turn
To Furies, O mine Enemy!
And all the things of beauty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy.
Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears. . . ."
Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day? with hearts that Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. Our love letters wear out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders, every stroke of the brush exhausts the impulse. Pre-Raphaelism had some twenty years, impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion can never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed as Mallarmé said, by "the trembling of the veil of the temple," or "that our whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book." Some of us thought that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again.
XXXII
I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that "morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling," for he is hidden behind failure “to unite it to perfection of form." At eleven one morning I met him in the British Museum Reading Room, probably in 1894, when I was in London for the production of The Land of Heart's Desire, but certainly after some long absence from London. "Are you working here?" I said; "No," he said, "I am loafing, for I have finished my day's
