Konx Om Pax

love, so far as he may be seen in a few lines, taken from amongst hundreds of their kind: To know you love me; that your bod lea 5 With the quick passion of your sou : to Know Your fragrant kisses sting my spirit so; To be one soul where Satan smiles and sleeps: Ah ! in the very triumph-hour of Hell Satan himself remembers whence he fell! These lines are not flawless; yet it needs no adjectives as drums to sound their praises. The palate that cannot appreciate such a vintage to the full knows not the taste of good wine. T11: Imperialism of Lam—In many lyrics and sonnets Mr. Crowley’s dominant note is the very Imperialism, the Romanism of love; just as throughout the whole of his work there is the ringing note of mastery. But when he has seen the wisdom of not flinging splendid lines away on those subjects which wiser men remember only to themselves, when he has ceased to prefer the lurid and quickly evanescent gems of the rubbish-heap of sensations for the enduring and unsurpassable beauty of the stars, then will he give us more and better even than Hush—the music swells apace, Rolls its silver billows up Throu h the void demesne of space To l. e heavens' azure cup! Hush, my love, and Sleep shall sigh “ This is immortality.l Mr. Crowley writes much of womanhood and woman, but he omits that without which there can be neither of them; that is femininity. His women are men in women’s clothes and places. He should take away some of their vigour, and in its stead give them grace, suppleness, and the art of winning by seeming capitulation. Amongst his other moods and imitations, conscious or unconscious, Mr. Crowley has much of Heine, without the latter’s petulance ; his Heinesque moods are steeled through with a strong man’s virility. But it is when we come to him in more abstract conditions of mind that we find him in a higher state. He says: I have dreamed life a circle or a lineI Called God and Fate and Chance and Man divine. I know not all I sat , but through it all Mark the dim hint oly ultimate sunshine. Naturz’r CalI.—And how many others have said great things, yet knew not all they said! Was there ever a poetical would-be unraveller of that skein of mystery, wherein life and death and nature work together, who could explain half of what he said? No; because it was not he who said those things, but nature speaking through him. Yet, if Mr. Crowley does not understand all he says, he sees something that is of far greater importance to him, as shown here: So I press on. Fresh strength from day to day Girds up my loins and beckons me on high. So I depart upon the desert way; So I strive ever toward the copper sky, With lips burnt black, and blind in either eye. I move for ever to my in tic goal, Where I may drain a ountatn never dry; And of Life's guerdon gather in the whole, And on celestial manna satist my souL And fitly may that pronouncement be rounded off with these four lines as a message to all mankind: So shalt thou conquer Space, and lastly climb The walls of Time; And, by the golden path the great have trod Reach up to God. 9