Short Fiction by Arthur Machen (ebook reader .txt) 📕

face,
I covered it with my embrace,
I hid it in a secret place.
And every day I went to see
This stone that was my ecstasy;
And worshipped it with flowers rare,
And secret words and sayings fair.
O stone, so rare and red and wise
O fragment of far Paradise,
O Star, whose light is life! O Sea,
Whose ocean is infinity!
Thou art a fire that ever burns,
And all the world to wonder turns;
And all the dust of the dull day
By thee is changed and purged away,
So that, where’er I look, I see
A world of a Great Majesty.
The sullen river rolls all gold,
The desert park’s a faery wold,
When on the trees the wind is borne
I hear the sound of Arthur’s horn
I see no town of grim grey ways,
But a great city all ablaze
With burning torches, to light up
The pinnacles that shrine the Cup.
Ever the magic wine is poured,
Ever the Feast shines on the board,
Ever the song is borne on high
That chants the holy Magistry⁠—
Etc. etc. etc.

From such documents as these it is clearly impossible to gather any very definite information. But on the last page Darnell has written⁠—

“So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.”

Endnotes

Dr. Phillips tells me that he has seen the head in question, and assures me that he has never received such a vivid presentment of intense evil. ↩

Colophon

Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories and novellas written and published between 1894 and 1922 by
Arthur Machen.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2004 and 2011 by
Tom Harris, Suzanne Shell, Stephen Blundell, Dave Haren, Marc D’Hooghe, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at
Google Books.

The cover page is adapted from
Idyll (Pan Amidst Columns),
a painting completed in 1875 by
Arnold Böcklin.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
September 20, 2015, 3:11 a.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/arthur-machen/short-fiction.

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Uncopyright

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