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