Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
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English Edition · Branch 6 of 22
The Cave of Lilith · ¶¶ 7–16
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
p. 7She paused a little, and then went on: "There is that fantastic fellow who slipped by me. Could your wisdom not retain him? He returned to me full of anguish, and I wound my arms round him like a fair melancholy; and now his sadness is as sweet to him as hope was before his fall. Listen to his song!" She paused again. A voice came up from the depths chanting a sad knowledge:
Line MOA-CL-P0008: What of all the will to do?Line MOA-CL-P0008: It has vanished long ago,Line MOA-CL-P0008: For a dream-shaft pierced it throughLine MOA-CL-P0008: From the Unknown Archer's bow.Line MOA-CL-P0009: What of all the soul to think?Line MOA-CL-P0009: Some one offered it a cupLine MOA-CL-P0009: Filled with a diviner drink,Line MOA-CL-P0009: And the flame has burned it up.Line MOA-CL-P0010: What of all the hope to climb?Line MOA-CL-P0010: Only in the self we gropeLine MOA-CL-P0010: To the misty end of time,Line MOA-CL-P0010: Truth has put an end to hope.Line MOA-CL-P0011: What of all the heart to love?Line MOA-CL-P0011: Sadder than for will or soul,Line MOA-CL-P0011: No light lured it on above:Line MOA-CL-P0011: Love has found itself the whole."Is it not pitiful? I pity only those who pity themselves. Yet he is mine more surely than ever. This is the end of human wisdom. How shall he now escape? What shall draw him up?"
"His will shall awaken," said the Wise One. "I do not sorrow over him, for long is the darkness before the spirit is born. He learns in your caves not to see, not to hear, not to think, for very anguish flying your illusions."
"Sorrow is a great bond," Lilith said.
"It is a bond to the object of sorrow. He weeps what thou canst never give him, a life never breathed in thee. He shall come forth, and thou shalt not see him at the time of passing. When desire dies the swift and invisible will awakens. He shall go forth; and one by one the dwellers in your caves will awaken and pass onward. This small old path will be trodden by generation after generation. Thou, too, O shining Lilith, shalt follow, not as mistress, but as handmaiden."
"I will weave spells," Lilith cried. "They shall never pass me. I will drug them with the sweetest poison. They shall rest drowsily and content as of old. Were they not giants long ago, mighty men and heroes? I overcame them with young enchantment. Shall they pass by feeble and longing for bygone joys, for the sins of their exultant youth, while I have grown into a myriad wisdom?"
Socrates
Reading The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories · The Cave of Lilith · ¶¶ 7–16
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.