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Let me first enumerate the comparatively profane achievements of these few months. Firstly, 
"Across the Gulf". This is a prose story of some twenty thousand words. The theme is my own life in 
the 26th Dynasty, when I was Ankh-f-n-khonsu and brought about the Aeon of Osiris to replace that 
of Isis. The story must not be taken as true in the ordinary sense of the word, but as allegorical. 
I wrote many lyrics, but especially "The Sevenfold Sacrament". This poem subsequently appeared in 
the English Review and has often been reprinted. It 
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is, one might say, a pendant to Aha! It is one of my finest achievements from a technical point of 
view and describes the actual experience of a night which I spent at Montigny. I was staying at an 
inn called the Vanne Rouge, on the bank of the Loing overlooking a weir. (The inn has since then 
become fashionable and impossible; at that time it was adorable in every way.) 
In eddies of obsidian, 
At my feet the river ran 
Between me and the poppy-pranky 
Isle, with tangled roots embanked, 
Where seven sister poplars stood 
Like the seven sisters of god. 
Soft as silence in mine ear, 
The drone and rustle of the weir 
Told in bass the treble tale 
Of the embowered nightingale. 
Higher, on the patient river, 
Velvet lights without a quiver 
Echoed through their hushed rimes 
The garden's glow beneath the limes. 
Then the sombre village, crowned 
By the castellated ground, 
Where in cerements of sable, 
One square tower and one great gable 
Stood, the melancholy wraith 
Of a false and fallen faith. 
Over all, supine, enthralling, 
The young moon, her faint edge falling 
To the dead verge of her setting, 
Saintly swam, her silver fretting 
All the leaves with light. Afar 
Towards the Zenith stood a star, 
As of all worthiness and fitness 
The luminous eternal witness. 
I described how the silence stripped me of myself; how I came once more into the Abyss and was 
drawn thence into the most secret Temple of the Most High, and there received the seven-fold 
sacrament. 
Nor is it given to any son of man 
To hymn that sacrament, the One in Seven, 
Where God and priest and worshipper, 
Deacon, asperger, thurifer, chorister, 
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