face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a
dream within a dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an
understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought, that it was
Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman
from the beginning of the world has ever known what love is, or
looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a
spirit, and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune
with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows love
through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if
ignobly through vehement jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable
desire; but unveiled love he never knows. While I thought these
things, a voice cried to me from the crimson figures: 'Into the
dance! there is none that can be spared out of the dance; into the
dance! into the dance! that the gods may make them bodies out of the
substance of our hearts'; and before I could answer, a mysterious
wave of passion, that seemed like the soul of the dance moving within
our souls, took Alchemica. hold of me, and I was swept, neither
consenting nor refusing, into the midst. I was dancing with an immortal
august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture
seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is
between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed upon
the waters; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us
and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages
seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our
robes and in her heavy hair.

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that
her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their
places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who
was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox