secret, for the mirror may disclose a world Still 

 invisible to us, may reflect what our own or Waters, 

 an ancestral memory dimly recalls, may reveal 

 what the soul perceives and translates from 

 its secret silences into symbol and the 

 mysterious speech of the imagination. 



StiH waters ; it has the inward music that 

 lies in certain words . . . amber, ivory, foam, 

 silence, dreams ; that lies often in some 

 marriage of words . . . moonlight at sea, 

 wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old 

 sorrowful things : that dwells in some names 

 of things, as chrysoprase ; or in some combina- 

 tion of natural terms and associations, as 

 wind and wave ; or in some names of women 

 and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen, Helen, 

 Cleopatra ; or in the words that serve in the 

 courts of music . . . cadence, song, threnody, 

 epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude, fugue. One 

 can often evade the heavy airs of the hours 

 of weariness by the spell of one of these wooers 

 of dreams. Foam and the hour is gathered 

 up like mist, and we, are amid " perilous seas 

 in faery lands forlorn " : Wind and the noises 

 of the town are like the humming of wild bees 

 in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs, 

 listening, or standing solitary in the dusk by 

 a forlorn shore with a tempestuous sea filling 

 the darkness with whispers and confused 



263 



