The Star in the West

IO THE STAR IN THE WEST contour of her form . But no vestal is Crowley , no mere milk -and -bun -walk , where we may rest and take our fill ; for he has unstrung the mystic lyre of life from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil , singing old songs and new , Alinging shrill notes of satire to this tumultuous world , as some stormy petrel shrilly crying to the storm ; or sweet notes of love , soft as the whispering wings of a butterfly . Here are the jewels of Heaven , of Havilah , and of Eden , with not a little of the fire of Hell , the flames of Gehenna , and the darkness of Dûat . If we look for pyramids and colossi disappointment will be our lot ; we cannot hold , as Hanuman of Ind , a mountain in one hand and a forest in the other , neither can we gaze on a celestial Meru or Olympus ; but as we look , and here it is only the searcher who is rewarded , we find a little jewel , then another , and still another , till , as we grasp them , their very light is caught by their unfound fellows , and our path is lit as a fairy dell by a thousand wonders of light and of beauty . “ A little more clothing ,” the critic writes , as he perused the “ Poems and Ballads , ” perhaps , yet we do not feel its need in the glowing works before us . Forty long years have passed , and the world moves . Crowley fairly puts his characters to bed , tucks them up , and does not blow the candle out with cryptic Morse - like dot and dash , leaving the imagination to wallow in the dark , intelligible to the baby - mind of sucklings , and we admire him all the more for not doing so ; his undraped virginity is delightful , and if his maidens lack vestments and his matrons mantles , it is a hearty sight , a robust sight , it flushes the drains of our mind , and discloses a heart lying beneath all the conventional tweeds and silks of our sleek respect