"rslcm10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yeats William Butler)

BY

W.B. YEATS

O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries of the gods,
sanctifies his life, and purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in the
mountains with holy purifications.--_Euripides._



ROSA ALCHEMICA. I

It is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael
Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends and
fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured
those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writings
have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almost
to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just published
Rosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists, somewhat in the
manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many letters from
believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they called my
timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy but the
sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything which has
moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in my
researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, but
a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man
himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals
merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some
divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my
little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into
art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of
essences.

I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of
the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous
through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships
with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted
happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and
made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The
portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and
tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the
doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty
and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the
rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and
precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the
grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a
Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I
pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had
mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various