Renée Vivien...

By Mr. Saltus HISTORIA AMORIS IMPERIAL PURPLE MARY MAGDALEN THE POMPS OF SATAN THE PERFUME OF EROS VANITY SQUARE...

THE ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language. Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream that they remain. "Mortal has made the immortal," the Rig-Veda explicitly declares. The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it has

THE purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of things." So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra. "And what was there at the beginning?" the prophet asked. "There was light and the living Word." [6] Long later the statement was repeated in the Gospel attributed to John. Originally it occurred in the course of a conversation that the Avesta reports. In a similar manner Exodus provides a revelation which Moses received. There Jehovah said: 'ehyèh 'Ăsher 'ehyèh . In the Avesta Ormuzd said:

I AM all that is, has been and shall be. No mortal has lifted my veil." That pronouncement, graven on the statue of Isis, confounded Egypt, condemning her mysteriously for some sin, anterior and unknown, to ignorance of the divine, leaving her, in default of revelation, to worship what she would, jackals, hyenas, cats, hawks, the ibis; beasts and birds. Yet to the people, whose minds were as naked as their bodies, and who, in addition, were slaves, there must have been something very superior in

THE inscriptions of Assyrian kings have, many of them, the monotony of hell. Made of boasts and shrieks, they recite the capture and sack of cities; the torrents of blood with which, like wool, the streets were dyed; the flaming pyramids of prisoners; the groans of men impaled; the cries of ravished women. The inscriptions are not all infernal. Those that relate to Assurbanipal—vulgarly, Sandanapallos,—are even ornate. But Assurbanipal, while probably fiendish and certainly crapulous, was clearl

A CAMEL'S-HAIR tent set in the desert was the first cathedral, the earliest cloister of latest ideals. Set not in one desert merely but in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of space, there was about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future awake, and into which all things, the human, the divine, gods and romance, could enter. The human came first. Then the gods. Then romance. The divine was their triple expansion. It was an after growth, in other lands, that tea

IN Judea, when Jahveh was addressed, he answered, if at all, with a thunderclap. Since then he has ceased to reply. Zeus was more complaisant. One might enter with him into the intimacy of the infinite. The father of the Graces, the Muses, the Hours, it was natural that he should be debonair. But he had other children. Among them were Litai, the Prayers. In the Vedas , where Zeus was born, the Prayers upheld the skies. Lame and less lofty in Greece, they could but listen and intercede. The detai

THE name of the national deity of Israel is unpronounceable. The name of the national divinity of Rome is unknown. To all but the hierophants it was a secret. For uttering it a senator was put to death. But Tullius Hostilius erected temples to Fear and to Pallor. It may have been Fright. The conjecture is supported by the fact that, as was usual, Rome had any number of deified epithets, as she had also a quantity of little bits of gods. These latter greatly amused the Christian Fathers. Among th