To give that, that lovely fragrant flame of the old material earth, to the altars of the bowed spirit: to clothe it in the fire of heaven: to commit it to the unassuaged thirst of the everlasting graves of the sea.--Surely, here, an image of that Rosa Mundi which has been set upon the forehead of the world since time was, that Rose of Beauty, that Rose of Time, that Rose of the world which the passion of the soul has created as a prayer to the Inscrutable: the Rose of the Soul, of you, of me, of all that have been, of all that are, of all unborn, that we lay upon our places of prayer, and offer to the Secret Fires, and commit to desolation, and sorrow, and the salt and avid hunger of Death? What came of that mystical wedding, of the world we know and the world we do not know, by that rose of the spirit, committed thus in so great a hope, so great a faith? The Druid is not here to tell. Faith after Faith has withered like a leaf. But still we stand by ancestral altars, still offer the Rose of our Desire to the veiled Mystery, still commit this our symbol to the fathomless, the everlasting, the unanswering Deep. THE STAR OF REST A FRAGMENT _REST_--what an OCEANIC word! I have been thinking of this unfathomable, unpenetrable word with mingled longing, and wonder, and even awe. What depths are in it, what infinite spaces, what vast compassionate sky, what tenderness of oblivion, what husht awakenings, what quiet sinkings and fadings into peace. Waking early, I took the word as one might take a carrier-dove and loosed it into the cloudy suspense of the stilled mind--and it rose again and again in symbolic cloud-thought, now as an infinite green forest murmurous with a hidden wind, now in some other guise and once as Ecstasy herself, listening. _Dear soft, sweet breath of the hills, Good-night!_ [Illustration: “... _a change from dream of Beauty, to Beauty_.” _F. M._] _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. SOME PRESS NOTICES “Not beauty alone, but that element of strangeness in beauty which Mr. Pater rightly discerned as the inmost spirit of romantic art--it is this which gives to Miss Macleod’s work its peculiar æsthetic charm.”--_Mr. Ashcroft Noble._ * * * * *