Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
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English Edition · Branch 12 of 22
A Dream of Angus Oge · ¶¶ 9–18
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
p. 13"I guess he's one of the people who take you away to faeryland. Wonder if he'd come to me? Think it's easy going away," with an intuitive perception of the frailty of the link binding childhood to earth in its dreams. (As a man Con will strive with passionate intensity to regain that free, gay motion in the upper airs.) "Think I'll try if he'll come," and he sang, with as near an approach as he could make to the glimmering cadences of his sister's voice:
Line MOA-AO-P0010: Come, thou, my shepherd, and lead me away.He then lay back quite still and waited. He could not say whether hours or minutes had passed, or whether he had slept or not, until he was aware of a tall golden-bearded man standing by his bed. Wonderfully light was this figure, as if the sunlight ran through his limbs; a spiritual beauty was on the face, and those strange eyes of bronze and gold with their subtle intense gaze made Con aware for the first time of the difference between inner and out in himself.
"Come, Con, come away!" the child seemed to hear uttered silently.
"You're the Shepherd!" said Con, "I'll go." Then suddenly, "I won't come back and be old when they're all dead?" a vivid remembrance of Ossian's fate flashing upon him.
A most beautiful laughter, which again to Con seemed half soundless, came in reply. His fears vanished; the golden-bearded man stretched a hand over him for a moment, and he found himself out in the night, now clear and starlit. Together they moved on as if borne by the wind, past many woods and silver-gleaming lakes, and mountains which shone like a range of opals below the purple skies. The Shepherd stood still for a moment by one of these hills, and there flew out, riverlike, a melody mingled with a tinkling as of innumerable elfin hammers, and there, was a sound of many gay voices where an unseen people were holding festival, or enraptured hosts who were let loose for the awakening, the new day which was to dawn, for the delighted child felt that faeryland was come over again with its heroes and battles.
"Our brothers rejoice," said the Shepherd to Con.
"Who are they?" asked the boy.
"They are the thoughts of our Father."
"May we go in?" Con asked, for he was fascinated by the melody, mystery, and flashing lights.
Socrates
Reading The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories · A Dream of Angus Oge · ¶¶ 9–18
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.