The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux by W.B. Yeats

The followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition, / wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house / of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven / and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him / inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after / generation, until other students of the order came upon the tomb by / chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very different / history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid in a great / tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable magical lamps of / wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly housed and apparelled / that we have forgotten that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened for / the complaining of some melancholy and ghostly voice. The ancients and / the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons / herself to love, and created great beings who made the people of this / world seem but shadows, and great passions which made our loves and / hatreds appear but ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is not the / great persons, or the great passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the / persons and passions in our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has / caught from older poems or from the life about us, but the wise comments / we make upon them, the criticism of life we wring from their fortunes. / Arthur and his Court are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play / about them are as beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia / and Guido are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and / expositions which climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of / the Christian age.

I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of / criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of / moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in / a supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are / 'phantoms of the earth and water' has gone down the wind, we will trust / our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external world is / no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the great / Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them 'uncurbed in their / eternal glory,' even in their labour for the ending of man's peace and / prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the tendencies / of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or other / forces of our time, or even 'to sum up' our time, as the phrase is; for / Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the artist is in / the old saying, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the / sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; / so is every one that is born of the spirit. '