Concerning Saints and Artists by W.B. Yeats

I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the / ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it / before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was / no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not / forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined / together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the / meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was / looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being / rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself / again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently / he pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fading / twilight, and cried at the top of his voice, 'Why do you look at me with / your great eye? ' There were perhaps a dozen people already much excited / when we arrived; and after I had drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a / pellet or two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not, as I / could not remember any steps. I sat down and closed my eyes; but no, I / had no visions, nothing but a sensation of some dark shadow which seemed / to be telling me that some day I would go into a trance and so out of my / body for a while, but not yet. I opened my eyes and looked at some red / ornament on the mantelpiece, and at once the room was full of harmonies / of red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the harmonies became / blue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds were all there, / nothing had changed, but they were no longer important or harmonious; / and why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago become exciting / and delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a painter, / and that in the course of the evening every one there would change / through every kind of artistic perception.

After a while a Martinist ran towards me with a piece of paper on which / he had drawn a circle with a dot in it, and pointing at it with his / finger he cried out, 'God, God! ' Some immeasurable mystery had been / revealed, and his eyes shone; and at some time or other a lean and / shabby man, with rather a distinguished face, showed me his horoscope / and pointed with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. The / boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the Indian hemp, had told me / that it took one three months growing used to it, three months more / enjoying it, and three months being cured of it. These men were in their / second period; but I never forgot myself, never really rose above myself / for more than a moment, and was even able to feel the absurdity of that / gaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius but one that was abashed / at his own sobriety. The sky outside was beginning to grey when there / came a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the window, and / a woman in evening dress, who was not a little bewildered to find so / many people, was helped down into the room. She had been at a student's / ball unknown to her husband, who was asleep overhead, and had thought to / have crept home unobserved, but for a confederate at the window. All / those talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and she, / understanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men that had / no thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed and / darted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman's rope / should be own brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone, were it / not for some stray cactus, mother of as many dreams, an immemorial / impartiality and simpleness.