ROSA ALCHEMICA

BY

W.B. YEATS

O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries of the gods,
sanctifies his life, and purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in the
mountains with holy purifications.--_Euripides._



ROSA ALCHEMICA. I

It is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael
Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends and
fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured
those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writings
have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almost
to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just published
Rosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists, somewhat in the
manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many letters from
believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they called my
timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy but the
sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything which has
moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in my
researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, but
a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man
himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals
merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some