Edward Payson Roe - "Opening a Chestnut Burr"

Flavius Josephus - "The Life of Flavius Josephus"

John Ellis - "Personal Experience of a Physician"

Richard Johnson - "An Address to the Inhabitants Of The Colonies, established in"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: AE in the Irish Theosophist

G >> George William Russell >> AE in the Irish Theosophist




His manner was very kindly; still Harvey was so shy that he would
have found some excuse, but for that chance expression, "out of
the universe." Was not this apartness the very thing he had just
been bitterly feeling? While he hesitated and stammered in his
awkwardness, the other said: "There, no excuses! You need not go
to your lodgings for tea. Come along with me."

They went off together through the darkening streets. One cheerful
and irreverent, brimful of remark or criticism; the other silent,
his usual dreaminess was modified, but had not departed, and once,
gazing up through the clear, dark blue, where the stars were shining,
he had a momentary sense as if he were suspended from them by a fine
invisible thread, as a spider hung from her roof; suspended from
on high, where the pure and ancient aether flamed around the
habituations of eternity; and below and about him, the thoughts
of demons, the smoke, darkness, horror and anguish of the pit.





Chapter II.




I Cannot tell all the steps by which the young soul came forth from
its clouds and dreams, but must hurry over the years. This single
incident of his boyhood I have told to mark the character and
tendency of his development; spirituality made self-conscious
only in departing; life, a falling from ideals which grew greater,
more beautiful and luminous as the possibility of realizing them
died away. But this ebbtide of inner life was not regular and
incessant, but rather after the fashion of waves which retreat
surely indeed, but returning again and again, seem for moments to
regain almost more than their past altitude. His life was a series
of such falls and such awakenings. Every new experience which drew
his soul from its quietude brought with it a revelation of a spiritual
past, in which, as it now seemed, he had been living unconsciously.
Every new experience which enriched his mind seemed to leave his
soul more barren. The pathetic anguish of these moments had little
of the moral element, which was dormant and uncultivated rather
than perverted. He did not ponder over their moral aspect, for he
shared the superficial dislike to the ethical, which we often see
in purely artistic natures, who cannot endure the entrance of
restraint or pain upon their beauty. His greatest lack was the
companionship of fine men or noble women. He had shot up far beyond
the reach of those whom he knew, and wanting this companionship
he grew into a cynical or sensuous way of regarding them. He began
to write: he had acquired the faculty of vigourous expression by
means of such emotions as were tinged with a mystical voluptuousness
which was the other pole to his inner, secret and spiritual being.
The double strain upon his energies, which daily work and nightly
study with mental productiveness involved, acted injuriously upon
his health, and after a year he became so delicate that he could
carry on neither one nor other of his avocations without an interval
of complete rest. Obtaining leave from his employers, he went
back for a period of six weeks to the village where he had been born.
Here in the early summer and sunshine his health rapidly improved;
his mind even more than his body drank deep draughts of life; and
here, more than at any period in his life, did his imagination begin
to deal with mighty things, and probe into the secret mysteries of
life, and here passed into the long descended line by which the
human spirit passed from empire; he began to comprehend dimly by
what decadence from starry state the soul of man is ushered into
the great visible life. These things came to him not clearly as
ideas, but rather as shadowy and shining vision thrown across the
air of dawn of twilight as he moved about.

Not alone did this opulence of spiritual life make him happy, another
cause conspired with it to this end. He had met a nature somewhat
akin to his own: Olive Rayne, the woman of his life.

As the days passed over he grew eager not to lose any chance of
speech with her, and but two days before his departure he walked
to the village hoping to see her. Down the quiet English lane in
the evening he passed with the rapid feet that bear onward unquiet
or feverish thought. The clear fresh air communicated delight to him;
the fields grown dim, the voice of the cuckoo, the moon like a yellow
globe cut in the blue, the cattle like great red shadows driven
homeward with much unnecessary clamour by the children; all these
flashed in upon him and became part of him: ready made accessories
and backgrounds to his dreams, their quietness stilled and soothed
the troubled beauty of passion. His pace lessened as he came near
the village, half wondering what would serve as excuse for visits
following one so soon upon the other. Chance served as excuse.
He saw her grey dress, her firm upright figure coming out from among
the lilac brushes at the gate of her father's house. She saw Harvey
coming towards her and waited for him with a pleasant smile. Harvey,
accustomed to introspect and ideal imaginings, here encountered no
shock gazing upon the external. Some last light of day reflected
upward from the white gate-post, irradiated her face, and touched
with gold the delicate brown hair, the nosrtils, lips, chin, and
the lilac of her throat. Her features were clear-cut, flawless;
the expression exquisitely grave and pure; the large grey eyes
had that steady glow which shows a firm and undisturbed will. In
some undefinable way he found himself thinking of the vague objects
of his dreams, delicate and subtle things, dew, starlight, and
transparencies rose up by some affinity. He rejected them--not
those--then a strong warrior with a look of pity on his face appeared
and disappeared: all this quick as a flash before she spoke.

"I am going doctoring," she said. "Old nurse Winder is ill, and my
father will not be back until late." Mr. Rayne was the country doctor.

"May I go with you?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, why not? But I have first to call at two or three places
on the way."

He went with her. He was full of wonder at her. How could she
come out of her own world of aspiration and mystic religion and
show such perfect familiarity, ease and interest in dealing with
these sordid village complaints, moral and physical? Harvey was
a man who disliked things like these which did not touch his sense
of beauty. He could not speak to these people as she did: he could
not sympathize with them. The pain of the old woman made him shrink
into himself almost with more disgust than pity. While Olive was
bending over her tenderly and compassionately, he tried to imagine
what it was inspired such actions and such self-forgetfulness.
Almost it seemed for a moment to him as if some hidden will in the
universe would not let beauty rest in its own sphere, but bowed it
down among sorrows continually. He felt a feeling of relief as
they came out agin into the night.

It was a night of miracle and wonder. Withdrawn far aloft into
fairy altitudes, the stars danced with a gaiety which was more
tremendous and solemn than any repose. The night was wrought out
of a profusion of delicate fires. The grass, trees, and fields
glowed with the dusky colours of rich pottery. Everywhere silence;
everywhere the exultant breathing of life, subtle, universal,
penetrating. Into the charmed heart fell the enchantment we call
ancient, though the days have no fellows, nor will ever have any.
Harvey, filled up with this wonder, turned to his companion.

"See how the Magician of the Beautiful blows with his mystic breath
upon the world! How tremulous the lights are; what still ness!
How it banishes the memory of pain!"

"Can you forget pain so easily? I hardly noticed the night--it is
wonderful indeed. But the anguish it covers and enfolds everywhere
I cannot forget."

"I could not bear to think of pain at any time, still less while
these miracles are over and around us. You seem to me almost to
seek pain like a lover. I cannot understand you. How can you bear
the ugly, the mean, the sordid--the anguish which you meet. You--
so beautiful?"

"Can you not understand?" she said, almost impetuously. "Have you
never felt pity as universal as the light that floods the world?
To me a pity seems to come dropping, dropping, dropping from that
old sky, upon the earth and its anguish. God is not indifferent.
Love eternal encircles us. Its wishes are for our redemption.
Its movements are like the ripples starting from the rim of a pond
that overcome the outgoing ripples and restore all to peace.

"But what is pain if there is this love?" asked Harvey.

"Ah, how can I answer you? Yet I think it is the triumph of love
pushing back sin and rebellion. The cry of this old nature being
overcome is pain. And this is universal, and goes on everywhere,
through we cannot comprehend it; and so, when we yield to this
divine love, and accept the change, we find in pain a secret
sweetness. It is the first thrill that heralds an immense dawn."

"But why do you say it is universal? Is not that a frightful thought?"

"If God is the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, then the life
of Christ on earth was a symbol--must be a symbol--of what endures
for ever: the Light and Darkness for ever in conflict: a crucifixion
in eternity."

This belief, so terrible, so pathetic, so strange, coming from this
young girl affected Harvey profoundly. He did not reject it. The
firmness and surety of her utterance, the moral purity of her
character, appealed to him who felt his own lack of clear belief
and heroic purpose. Like all spiritual people, he assimilated
easily the spiritual moods of those whom he came into contact with.
Coming from her, the moral, pathetic, and Christian doctrine had
that element of beauty which made it blend with his ideal paganism.
As he went homewards he pondered over her words, her life, her
thoughts. He began to find an inexpressible beauty in her pity,
as a feeling welling up from unknown depths, out of the ancient
heart of things. Filled with this pity he could overcome his dislike
of pain and go forth as the strong warrior of his momentary vision.
He found himself repeating again and again her words: "We find in
pain a secret sweetness--a secret sweetness--a secret sweetness."
If he could only find it, what might he not dare, to what might he
not attain? And revolving all these things upon his restless pillow,
there came over him one of those mystic moods I have spoken of:
wandering among dim originals, half in dream and half in trance,
there was unfolded within him this ancient legend of the soul:--


There was a great Gloom and a great Glory in nature, and the legions
of darkness and the glorious hosts were at war perpetually with one
another. Then the Ancient of Days, who holds all this within himself,
moved the Gloom and the Glory together: the Sons of the Bright Fire
he sent into the darkness, and the children of Darkness he brought
unto the gates of the day. And in the new life formed out of the
union of these two, pain, self-conscious, became touched with a
spiritual beauty, and those who were of the Hosts of Beauty wore
each one a Crown of Thorns upon the brow.




Chapter III.

Harvey rose up early; as he walked to and fro in the white dawn,
he found the answers to every question in his mind: they rose up
with a sweet and joyful spontaneity. Life became filled with
happiest meaning: a light from behind the veil fell upon the things
he had before disliked, and in this new light, pain, sorrow, and
the old moralities were invested with a significance undreamt of
before. In admitting into his own mind Olive Rayne's ideas, he
removed something of their austerity: what he himself rejected,
seen in her, added another and peculiar interest to the saintly
ideal of her which he had formed. She had once said, peace and
rest were inconceivable while there existed strife and suffering
in nature. Nowhere could there be found refuge; drawing near unto
the divine, this pain only became wider, more intense, almost
insufferable, feeling and assimilating the vastness of divine sorrow
brooding over the unreclaimed deep. This pity, this consciousness
of pain, not her own, filling her own, filling her life, marked
her out from everyone he knew. She seemed to him as one consecrated.
Then this lover in his mystic passion passed in the contemplation
of his well-beloved from the earthly to the invisible soul. He
saw behind and around her a form unseen by others; a form, spiritual,
pathetic, of unimaginable beauty, on which the eternal powers kept
watch, which they nourished with their own life, and on which they
inflicted their own pain. This form was crowned, but with a keen-
pointed radiance from which there fell a shadowy dropping. As he
walked to and fro in the white dawn he made for her a song, and
inscribed it.

To One Consecrated

Your paths were all unknown to us:
We were so far away from you,
We mixed in thought your spirit thus--
With whiteness, stars of gold, and dew.

The mighty mother nourished you:
Her breath blew from her mystic bowers:
Their elfin glimmer floated through
The pureness of your shadowy hours.

The mighty mother made you wise;
Gave love that clears the hidden ways:
Her glooms were glory to your eyes;
Her darkness but the Fount of Days.

She made all gentleness in you,
And beauty radiant as the morn's:
She made our joy in yours, then threw
Upon your head a crown of thorns.

Your eyes are filled with tender light,
For those whose eyes are dim with tears;
They see your brow is crowned and bright,
But not its ring of wounding spears.

We can imagine no discomfiture while the heavenly light shines
through us. Harvey, though he thought with humility of his past
as impotent and ignoble in respect of action, felt with his rich
vivid consciousness that he was capable of entering into her subtlest
emotions. He could not think of the future without her; he could
not give up the hope of drawing nigh with her to those mysteries
of life which haunted them both. His thought, companioned by her,
went ranging down many a mystic year. He began to see strange
possibilities, flashes as of old power, divine magic to which all
the world responded, and so on till the thought trembled in vistas
ending in a haze of flame. Meanwhile, around him was summer:
gladness and youth were in his heart, and so he went on dreaming--
forecasting for the earth and its people a future which belongs
only to the spiritual soul--dreaming of happy years even as a
child dreams.

Later on that evening, while Olive was sitting in her garden, Dr.
Rayne came out and handed her a bundle of magazines.

"There are some things in these which may interest you, Olive," he
said: "Young Harvey writes for them, I understand. I looked over
one or two. They are too mystical for me. You will hardly find them
mystical enough."

She took the papers from him without much interest, and laid them
beside her on the seat. After a time she took them up. As she
read her brows began to knit, and her face grew cold. These verses
were full of that mystical voluptuousness which I said characterised
Harvey's earlier productions; all his rich imagination was employed
to centre interest upon moments of half-sensual sensations; the
imagery was used in such a way that nature seemed to aid and abet
the emotion; out of the heart of things, out of wild enchantment
and eternal revelry shot forth into the lives of men the fires of
passion. Nothing could be more unlike the Christ-soul which she
worshiped as underlying the universe and on which she had reliance.

"He does not feel pity; he does not understand love," she murmured.
She felt a cold anger arise; she who had pity for most things felt
that a lie had been uttered defiling the most sacred things in the
Holy of Holies, the things upon which her life depended. She could
never understand Harvey, although he had been included in the general
kindliness with which she treated all who came near her; but here
he seemed revealed, almost vaunting an inspiration from the
passionate powers who carry on their ancient war against the Most High.

The lights were now beginning to fade about her in the quiet garden
when the gate opened, and someone came down the path. It was Harvey.
In the gloom he did not notice that her usual smile was lacking,
and besides he was too rapt in his own purpose. He hesitated for
a moment, then spoke.

"Olive," he said tremulously, "as I came down the lanes to say good-bye
to you my heart rebelled. I could not bear the thought: Olive, I
have learned so many things from you; your words have meant so much
to me that I have taken them as the words of God. Before I knew
you I shrank from pain; I wandered in search of a false beauty.
I see now the purpose of life--to carry on the old heroic battle
for the true; to give the consolation of beauty to suffering;
to become so pure that through us may pass that divine pity which
I never knew until you spoke, and I then saw it was the root of
all life, and there was nothing behind it--such magic your words
have. My heart was glad this morning for you at this truth, and
I saw in it the power which would transfigure the earth. Yet all
this hope has come to me through you; I half hold it still through
you. To part from you now--it seems to me would be like turning
away from the guardian of the heavenly gateway. I know I have but
little to bring you. I must make all my plea how much you are to
me when I ask can you love me."

She had hardly heard a word of all he said. She was only conscious
that he was speaking of love. What love? Had he not written of it?
It would have emptied Heaven into the pit. She turned and faced him,
speaking coldly and deliberately:

"You could speak of love to me, and write and think of it like this!"
She placed her hand on the unfortunate magazines. Harvey followed
the movement of her arm. He took the papers up, then suddenly saw
all as she turned and walked away,--what the passion of these poems
must have seemed to her. What had he been in her presence that
could teach her otherwise? Only a doubter and questioner. In a
dreadful moment his past rose up before him, dreamy, weak, sensual.
His conscience smote him through and through. He could find no
word to say. Self-condemned, he moved blindly to the gate and went
out. He hardly knew what he was doing. Before him the pale dry
road wound its way into the twilight amid the hedges and cottages.
Phantasmal children came and went. There seemed some madness in
all they were doing. Why did he not hear their voices? They ran
round and round; there should have been cries or laughter or some
such thing. Then suddenly something seemed to push him forward,
and he went on blankly and walked down the lane. In that tragic
moment his soul seemed to have deserted him, leaving only a half-
animal consciousness. With dull attention he wondered at the muffled
sound of his feet upon the dusty road, and the little puffs of smoke
that shot out before them. Every now and then something would throb
fiercely for an instant and be subdued. He went on and on. His
path lay across some fields. He stopped by force of habit and
turned aside from the road. Again the same fierce throb. In a
wild instant he struggled for recollection and self-mastery, and
then the smothered soul rushed out of the clouds that oppressed it.
Memories of hope and shame: the morning gladness of his heart:
the brilliant and spiritual imaginations that inspired him: their
sudden ending: the degradation and drudgery of the life he was
to return to on the morrow: all rose up in tumultuous conflict.
A feeling of anguish that was elemental and not of the moment
filled him. Drifting and vacillating nature--he saw himself as
in a boat borne along by currents that carried him, now near isles
of beauty, and then whirled him away from their vanishing glory
into gloomy gulfs and cataracts that went down into blackness.
He was master neither of joy nor sorrow. Without will: unpractical;
with sensitiveness which made joy a delirium and gloom a very hell;
the days he went forward to stretched out iron hands to bind him
to the deadly dull and commonplace. These vistas, intolerable and
hopeless, overcame him. He threw himself down in his despair.
Around his head pressed the cool grasses wet with dew. Strange
and narrow, the boundary between heaven and hell! All around him
primeval life innocent and unconscious was at play. All around him,
stricken with the fever of life, that Power which made both light
and darkness, inscrutable in its workings, was singing silently
the lovely carol of the flowers.




Chapter IV.




Little heaps of paper activities piled themselves up, were added to,
diminished, and added to again, all the day long before Harvey at
his desk. He had returned to his work: there was an unusual press
of business, and night after night he was detained long beyond the
usual hours. The iron hand which he had foreseen was laid upon him:
it robbed him even of his right to sorrow, the time to grieve.
But within him at moments stirred memories of the past, poignant
anguish and fierce rebellion. With him everything transformed
itself finally into ideal images and aspects, and it was not so
much the memory of an incident which stung him as the elemental
sense of pain in life itself. He felt that he was debarred from
a heritage of spiritual life which he could not define even to himself.
The rare rays of light that slanted through the dusty air of the
office, mystic gold fallen through inconceivable distances from the
pure primeval places, wakened in him an unutterable longing: he
felt a choking in his throat as he looked. Often, at night, too,
lifting his tired eyes from the pages flaring beneath the bright
gas jet, he could see the blueness deepen rich with its ancient
clouds of starry dust. What pain it was to him, immemorial quiet,
passivity and peace, though over it a million tremors fled and
chased each other throughout the shadowy night! What pain it was
to let the eyes fall low and see about him the pale and feverish faces
looking ghostly through the hot, fetid, animal, and flickering air!

His work over, out into the night he would drag himself wearily--
out into the night anywhere; but there no more than within could
he escape from that power which haunted him with mighty memories,
the scourge which the Infinite wields. Nature has no refuge for
those in whom the fire of spirit has been kindled: earth has no
glory for which it does not know a greater glory. As Harvey passed
down the long streets, twinkling with their myriad lights fading
into blue and misty distances, there rose up before him in the
visionary air solemn rows of sphinxes in serried array, and starlit
pyramids and temples--greatness long dead, a dream that mocked the
lives around him, hoarding the sad small generations of humanity
dwindling away from beauty. Gone was the pure and pale splendour
of the primeval skies and the lustre of the first-born of stars.
But even this memory, which linked him in imagination to the ideal
past, was not always his: he was weighted, like all his race, with
an animal consciousness which cried out fiercely for its proper life,
which thirsted for sensation, and was full of lust and anger. The
darkness was not only about him, but in him, and struggled there
for mastery. It threw up forms of meanness and horrible temptations
which clouded over his soul; their promise was forgetfulness;
they seemed to say: "Satisfy us, and your infinite longing shall
die away: to be of clay is very dull and comfortable; it is the
common lot."

One night, filled with this intolerable pain, as he passed through
the streets he yielded to the temptation to kill out this torturing
consciousness: he accosted one of the women of the streets and
walked away with her. She was full of light prattle, and chattered
on and on. Harvey answered her not a word; he was set on his
stony purpose. Child of the Stars! what had he to do with these
things? He sought only his soul's annihilation. Something in
this terrible silence communicated itself to his companion. She
looked at his face in the light of a lamp; it was white, locked,
and rigid. Child of the Stars, no less, though long forgetful,
she shuddered at this association. She recoiled from him crying
out "You brute--you brute!" and then fled away. The unhappy man
turned homeward and sat in his lonely room with stupid, staring
eyes, fixed on darkness and vacancy until the pale green light of
dawn began to creep in upon him.

Into this fevered and anguished existence no light had yet come.
Drunken with wretchedness, Harvey could not or would not think;
and the implacable spirit which followed him deepened and quickened
still more the current of his being, and the GLOOM and the GLORY
of his dream moved still nearer to each other. Mighty and mysterious
spirit, thou who crownest pain with beauty, and by whom the mighty
are bowed down from their seats, under they guidance, for such a
crowning and for such agony, were coiled together the living streams
of evil and good, so that at last the man might know himself--the
soul--not as other than Thee!