Star In the West TNR.pdf - The Hermetic Library

FOREWORD
IN “Frazer’s Magazine” of November, 1866, may be found the following:
“Wherever there is any kind of true genius, we have no right to drive it mad
by ridicule or invective; we must deal with it wisely, justly, fairly. Some of
these passages which have been selected as evidence of (the poet’s) plain
speaking, have been wantonly misunderstood. The volume, as a whole, is
neither profane nor indecent. A little more clothing in our uncertain climate
might perhaps have been attended with advantage… To us this volume, for
the first time, conclusively settles that Mr.— is not a mere brilliant
rhetorician or melodious twanger of another man’s lyre, but authentically a
poet.”
So writes the critic. The name I have omitted is that of the last of the great
Victorian poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne. In the dying glory of this last
great singer of the nineteenth century, the deepening twilight shows but few
rising stars; alone perhaps amid the younger generation of poets – alas, how
many and yet how few – Aleister Crowley stands forth with no little of the
glory of the great Victorian cast o’er him; enhancing our pleasures, and
enchanting our senses. The Sun kisses the Moon, and through the
diaphanous veil of the vestal is seen the subtle contour of her form. But no
vestal is Crowley, no mere milk-and-bun-walk, where we may rest and take
our fill; for he has unstrung the mystic lyre of life from the tree of the
Knowledge of Good and of Evil, singing old songs and new, flinging shrill
notes of satire to this tumultuous world, as some stormy petrel shrilly crying
to the storm; or sweet notes of love, soft as the whispering wings of a
butterfly.
Here are the jewels of Heaven, of Havilah, and of Eden, with not a little of
the fire of Hell, the flames of Gehenna, and the darkness of Dûat. If we look
for pyramids and colossi disappointment will be our lot; we cannot hold, as
Hanuman of Ind, a mountain in one hand and a forest in the other, neither
can we gaze on a celestial Meru or Olympus; but as we look, and here it is
only the searcher who is rewarded, we find a little jewel, then another, and
still another, till, as we grasp them, their very light is caught by their