It would be best perhaps to leave the old allegory to speak for itself, because poetical thoughts are often mishandled, and suffer base transformation at the hands of interpreters; but for all that, it is a pretty trade to expound things seen in dreams and visions, or obscurely detected out of the corner of the eye in magical places; while the best of really poetical things is that they have a hundred mystical interpretations, none of which is perhaps the right one; because the poet sees things in a flash, and describes his visions, without knowing what they mean, or indeed if they have any meaning at all.

A place like a university, where one alights for an adventure, in the course of a long voyage, is in many ways like the island of Circe.  There is the great stone mansion with its shining doors and guarded cloisters.  It is a place of many enchantments and various delights.  There are mysterious people going to and fro, whose business it is hard to discern:  there are plenty of bowls and dishes, and water pleasantly warmed for the bath.  Circe herself had a private life of her own, and much curious information:  she was not for ever turning people into pigs; and indeed why she did it at all is not easy to discover!  It amused her, and she felt more secure, perhaps, when her visitors were safely housed, grunting and splashing about together.  One must not press an allegory too closely, but in any place where human beings consort, there is always some turning of men into pigs, even if they afterwards resume their shape again, and shed tears of relief at the change.

3

My purpose here is to speculate a little upon what the herb Moly can be, how it can be found and used.  Hermes, the messenger of the Gods, is always ready to pull it up for anyone who really requires it.  And just because “the isle,” as Shakespeare says, “is full of noises—­sounds and sweet airs,” it is a matter of concern to know which of them “give delight and hurt not,” and which of them lead only to manger and sty.  My discourse is not planned in a spirit of heavy rectitude, or from any desire to shower good advice about, as from a pepper-pot.  Indeed, I believe that there are many things in the correct conventional code which are very futile and grotesque; some which are directly hurtful; and further, that there are many things quite outside the code which are both fine and beautiful; because the danger of all civilised societies is that the members of it take the prevailing code for granted; do not trouble to think what it means, accept it as the way of life, and walk contentedly enough, like the beetle in the bone, which, as we know, can neither turn nor miss its way.

To fall feebly into the conventions of a place takes away all the joyful spirit of adventure; but the little island set in the ocean, with its loud sea-beaches, its upstanding promontories, its wooded glades, its open spaces, and above all the great house standing among its lawns, is a place of adventure above everything, with unknown forces at work, untamed emotions, swift currents of thought, many choices, strange delights; and then there is the shadowy sea beyond, with all its crested billows rolling in, and other islands looming out beyond the breakers, at which the ship may touch, before it finds its way to the regions of death and silence.