Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
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English Edition · Branch 4 of 22
The Mask of Apollo · ¶¶ 12–14
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
p. 5Then Dion and Neaera went out, and as they walked home through the forest, purple and vaporous in the evening light, they drew closer together. Dion, looking into the eyes of Neaera, saw there a new gleam, violet, magical, shining—there was the presence of Aphrodite; there was her shrine.
After came in unto Apollo the two grand-children of old Tithonus, and they cried: "See the flowers we have brought you! We gathered them for you in the valley where they grow best!" Apollo said: "What wisdom shall we give to children that they may remember? Our most beautiful for them!" And as he stood and looked at them the mask of age and secretness vanished. He appeared radiant in light. They laughed in joy at his beauty. Bending down he kissed each upon the forehead, then faded away into the light which is his home.
As the sun sank down amid the blue hills, the old priest awoke with a sigh, and cried out: "Oh, that we could talk wisely as we do in our dreams!"
Socrates
Reading The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories · The Mask of Apollo · ¶¶ 12–14
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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.