When age fell upon the world, and wonder went
out of the minds of men; when grey cities
reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and
ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of
the sun or of spring’s flowering meads;
when learning stripped earth of her mantle
of beauty, and poets sang no more save of
twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking
eyes; when these things had come to pass,
and childish hopes had gone away forever,
there was a man who travelled out of life
on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s
dreams had fled.
Of the name and abode of this man but little
is written, for they were of the waking world
only; yet it is said that both were obscure.
It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city
of high walls where sterile twilight reigned,
and that he toiled all day among shadow and
turmoil, coming home at evening to a room
whose one window opened not on the fields
and groves but on a dim court where other
windows stared in dull despair.
From that casement one might see only walls
and windows, except sometimes when one leaned
far out and peered aloft at the small stars
that passed.
And because mere walls and windows must soon
drive to madness a man who dreams and reads
much, the dweller in that room used night
after night to lean out and peer aloft to
glimpse some fragment of things beyond the
waking world and the greyness of tall cities.
After years he began to call the slow-sailing
stars by name, and to follow them in fancy
when they glided regretfully out of sight;
till at length his vision opened to many secret
vistas whose existence no common eye suspects.
And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and
the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the
lonely watcher’s window to merge with the
close air of his room and make him a part
of their fabulous wonder.
There came to that room wild streams of violet
midnight glittering with dust of gold; vortices
of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate
spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond
the worlds.
Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns
that the eye may never behold and having in
their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs
of unrememberable deeps.
Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer
and wafted him away without even touching
the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely
window; and for days not counted in men’s
calendars the tides of far spheres bare him
gently to join the dreams for which he longed;
the dreams that men have lost.
And in the course of many cycles they tenderly
left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore;
a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms
and starred by red camalotes.
