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Obstacles on the Path 
Cara Soror, 
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 
Peccavi! And how! But my excuse is good, and I will try to 
make amends . 
First, a little counter-attack-your 
letter is so rambling and 
diffuse that at first I couldn't make out what you were 
getting at, and at last decided that it is much too random to 
reproduce, or even to deal with in detail. I shall simply 
formulate the case for the Prosecution, plead guilty, and 
appeal for clemency. 
The gravamen is that the Path of the Wise is gay with 
flowers, gilded with kiosks, and beset with snares; that every 
step is the Abode of Terror and Rapture-and all that! Yet I 
habitually write in the manner of a drunken dominie! You 
"gaped for Aeschylus, and got Theognis." 
I tempted you, it seems with The Chymical Marriage of 
Christian 
Rosencreutz, 
its incomparable 
mystery and 
glamour, its fugitive beauty, 
its ineffable romance, its 
chivalry and its adventure, pellucid gleams as of sunlight 
under the sea, vast brooding wings of horror overshadowing 
the fimament, yet with strong Starlight constant over-head. 
And then I let you down! 
You did expect at least something of the atmosphere 
of The Arabian Nights; if not so high, of Apuleius and 
Petronius Arbiter; of Rabelais, Meinhold, de la Motte 
Fouque; and the Morte d'Arthur in the later times, of Balzac, 
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