The Candle of Vision

by AE (George William Russell)

"The Spirit of man is the candle of the Lord."--PROVERBS.

"When his candle shined on my head and by his light I walked through darkness."--JOB

London, Macmillan and Co., limited,

[1918]

Retrospect
The Earth Breath
The Slave of the Lamp
Meditation
The Many-Coloured Land
Analytic
The Mingling of Natures
The Memory of Earth
Imagination
Dreams
The Architecture of Dream
Have Imaginations Body?
Intuition
The Language of the Gods
Ancient Intuitions
Power
The Memory of the Spirit
Celtic Cosmogony
The Celtic Imagination
Earth

When I am in my room looking upon the walls I have painted I see there reflections of the personal life, but when I look through the windows I see a living nature and landscapes not painted by hands. So, too, when I meditate I feel in the images and thoughts which throng about me the reflections of personality, but there are also windows in the soul through which can be seen images created not by human but by the divine imagination. I have tried according to my capacity to report about the divine order and to discriminate between that which was self-begotten fantasy and that which came from a higher sphere. These retrospects and meditations are the efforts of an artist and poet to relate his own vision to the vision of the seers and writers of the sacred books, and to discover what element of truth lay in those imaginations.

A. E.