e other gazed at the curtain for a while and saw presently
a man led through a wood by a black hound, and then the hound lay dead at
a place the seer knew was called, without knowing why, 'the Meeting of the
Suns,' and the man followed a red hound, and then the red hound was
pierced by a spear. A white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he
did not look at it, for a white hound came and he followed it trembling,
but the seer knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it would
lead him among the gods. The most learned of the Hermetists said, 'I
cannot tell the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is,
but I think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star.' I have little
doubt that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the
darkness and passion of the world into some day of partial regeneration,
and that it was the Morning Star and would be the Evening Star at its
second coming. I have little doubt that it was but the story of Prince
Athanase and what may have been the story of Rousseau in _The Triumph of
Life_, thrown outward once again from that great memory, which is still
the mother of the Muses, though men no longer believe in it.

It may have been this memory, or it may have been some impulse of his
nature too subtle for his mind to follow, that made Keats, with his love
of embodied things, of precision of form and colouring, of emotions made
sleepy by the flesh, see Intellectual Beauty in the Moon; and Blake, who
lived in that energy he called eternal delight, see it in the Sun, where
his personification of poetic genius labours at a furnace. I think there
was certainly some reason why these men took so deep a pleasure in lights,
that Shelley thought of with weariness and trouble. The Moon is the most
changeable of symbols, and not merely because it is the symbol of change.
As mistress of the waters she governs the life of instinct and the
generation of things, for as Porphyry says, even 'the apparition of
images' in the 'imagination' is through 'an excess of moisture'; and, as a
cold and changeable fire set in the bare heavens, she governs alike
chastity and the joyless idle drifting hither and thither of generated
things. She may give God a body and have Gabriel to bear her messages, or
she may come to men in their happy moments as she came to Endymion, or she
may deny life and shoot her arrows; but because she only becomes beautiful
in giving herself, and is no flying