A Visionary

A young man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began
to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I
questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems
and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly had
neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon making
his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of the
artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily,
however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been
written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the
reeds,[FN#1] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and
of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen.
Suddenly it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little
eagerly. "Do you see anything, X-----?" I said. "A shining, winged
woman, covered by her long hair, is standing near the doorway," he
answered, or some such words. "Is it the influence of some living
person who thinks of us, and whose thoughts appear to us in that
symbolic form?" I said; for I am well instructed in the ways of the
visionaries and in the fashion of their speech. "No," he replied; "for
if it were the thoughts of a person who is alive I should feel the
living influence in my living body, and my heart would beat and my
breath would fail. It is a spirit. It is some one who is dead or who
has never lived."

[FN#1] I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a
part of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of
the world. I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I used
to be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged.
We once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser.

I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop. His
pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking to half-
mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and conscience-
stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles into his
care. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging, more than
one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and sun them
as it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions come to
him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told divers
people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and left
them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce more
than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.

The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.
Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in
other centuries,