Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
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English Edition · Branch 10 of 22
The Story of a Star · ¶¶ 12–17
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
p. 11He came nearer and touched me; once more I felt the thrill of being that changed itself into vision.
"The end is creation, and creation is joy. The One awakens out of quiescence as we come forth, and knows itself in us; as we return we enter it in gladness, knowing ourselves. After long cycles the world you live in will become like ours; it will be poured forth and withdrawn; a mystic breath, a mirror to glass your being."
He disappeared while I wondered what cyclic changes would transmute our ball of mud into the subtle substance of thought.
In that world I dared not stay during its period of withdrawal; having entered a little into its life, I became subject to its laws; the Powers on its return would have dissolved my being utterly. I felt with a wild terror its clutch upon me, and I withdrew from the departing glory, from the greatness that was my destiny—but not yet.
From such dreams I would be aroused, perhaps, by a gentle knock at my door, and my little cousin Margaret's quaint face would peep in with a "Cousin Robert, are you not coming down to supper?"
Of these visions in the light of after thought I would speak a little. All this was but symbol, requiring to be thrice sublimed in interpretation ere its true meaning can be grasped. I do not know whether worlds are heralded by such glad songs, or whether any have such a fleeting existence, for the mind that reflects truth is deluded with strange phantasies of time and place in which seconds are rolled out into centuries and long cycles are reflected in an instant of time. There is within us a little space through which all the threads of the universe are drawn; and, surrounding that incomprehensible centre, the mind of man sometimes catches glimpses of things which are true only in those glimpses; when we record them the true has vanished, and a shadowy story—such as this—alone remains. Yet, perhaps, the time is not altogether wasted in considering legends like these, for they reveal, though but in phantasy and symbol, a greatness we are heirs to, a destiny which is ours though it be yet far away.
Socrates
Reading The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories · The Story of a Star · ¶¶ 12–17
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Æ’s The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories gathers seven visionary tales in which Greek gods, Celtic memory, Indian wisdom, cosmic birth, and the moral power of imagination cross the borders between ordinary life and spiritual perception. This single-language Literary Fiction edition presents the complete supplied English working text in a continuous reader.
Historical Text
The stories were first gathered in Dublin by Whaley in an undated edition conventionally assigned to 1904. The reading text follows the seven tales as supplied in an editable transcription derived from Project Gutenberg eBook No. 8105, Imaginations and Reveries (1915). The transcription restores the collection’s compact form while noting that the later collected text may contain revisions and has not been line-by-line collated against every first-edition page image.
About This Edition
This English Edition preserves the supplied story sequence, paragraph boundaries, verse lineation, scene breaks, and authorial note. Its twenty-two branches follow the numbered working-text pages for comfortable reading and stable saved places; those page references are approximate rather than claims of facsimile-exact first-edition pagination.
Rights
The collection was published no later than 1905, and George William Russell died in 1935. The underlying English-language text is in the public domain in the United States and in jurisdictions using an ordinary life-plus-70 term.