The night before I left, I had a strange dream. I stood in a lonely
cemetery in a pine-forest. Dark trees that never shed their foliage rose
all around--strange trees that mourn for ever, because they never die. The
dream light that has no visible source, because it is in the soul that
dreams, showed all in a dim blue-grey dawn, that never grew clearer. The
night wind was the only power abroad save myself. It went with slow
intermitting, sigh-like gusts, through the tops of the dreaming trees; for
the trees seemed, in the midst of my dream, to have dreams of their own.
Now this burial-place was mine. I had tended it for years. In it lay all
the men and women whom I had honoured and loved.
And I was a great sculptor. And over every grave I had placed a marble
altar, and upon every altar the marble bust of the man or woman who lay
beneath; each in the supreme beauty which all the defects of birth and of
time and of incompleteness, could not hide from the eye of the prophetic
sculptor. Each was like a half-risen glorified form of the being who had
there descended into the realms of Hades.
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