No More Learning

There were two of them,
he said, in dark clothes like people of our own time, who stood about
a hundred yards from one another, but the others wore clothes of all
colours, 'bracket' or chequered, and some with red waistcoats.

He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been
playing hurley, for 'they looked as if it was that. ' Sometimes they
would vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of
the bodies of the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the
size of living men, but the others were small. He saw them for about
half-an-hour, and then the old man he and those about him were working
for took up a whip and said, 'Get on, get on, or we will have no work
done! ' I asked if he saw the faeries too. 'Oh, yes, but he did not want
work he was paying wages for to be neglected. ' He made everybody work
so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.

1902.




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,[A] 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. '

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, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them
to their own minds.