Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
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English Edition · Branch 16 of 22
The Meditation of Ananda · ¶¶ 10–15
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
p. 18* * *
At twilight, by a deep and wide river, an old woman sat alone, dreamy and full of memories. The lights of the swift passing boats and the light of the stars were just as in childhood and the old love-time. Old, feeble, it was time for her to hurry away from the place which changed not with her sorrow.
"Do you see our old neighbor there?" said Ayesha to her lover. "They say she was once as beautiful as you would make me think I now am. How lonely she must be! Let us come near and speak to her," and the lover went gladly. Though they spoke to each other rather than to her, yet something of the past, which never dies when love, the immortal, has pervaded it, rose up again as she heard their voices. She smiled, thinking of years of burning beauty.
* * *
A teacher, accompanied by his disciples, was passing by the wayside where a leper sat.
The teacher said: "Here is our brother, whom we may not touch, but he need not be shut out from truth. We may sit down where he can listen."
He sat on the wayside near the leper, and his disciples stood around him. He spoke words full of love, kindliness, and pity—the eternal truths which make the soul grow full of sweetness and youth. A small, old spot began to glow in the heart of the leper, and the tears ran down his blighted face.
* * *
All these were the deeds of Ananda the ascetic, and the Watcher who was over him from all eternity made a great stride towards that soul.
Socrates
Reading The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories · The Meditation of Ananda · ¶¶ 10–15
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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.