“Here are told the stories of these pictures of the imagination, of magic and romance. Yet they were gravely chosen withal, and for reasons manifold.... What if they be but dreams? ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of.’ What if they be but magic and romance? These things are not ancient and dead, but modern and increasing. For wherever a man learns power over Nature, there is Magic; wherever he carries out an ideal into Life there is Romance.”
Patrick Geddes:
“The Interpreter.”
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PROLOGUE
(TO KATHIA)
I find, under the boughs of love and hate,
Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.
The Rose upon the Rood of Time.
TO you, in your far-away home in Provence, I send these tales out of the remote North you love so well, and so well understand. The same blood is in our veins, a deep current somewhere beneath the tide that sustains us. We have meeting-places that none knows of; we understand what few can understand; and we share in common a strange and inexplicable heritage. It is because you, who are called Kathia of the Sunway, are also Kathia nan Ciar, Kathia of the Shadow, it is because you are what you are that I inscribe this book to you. In it you will find much that is familiar to you, though you may never have read or heard anything of the kind; for there is a reality, beneath the unfamiliar accident, which may be recognised in a moment as native to the secret life that lives behind the brain and the wise nerves with their dim ancestral knowledge.
The greater portion of this book deals with the remote life of a remote past. “The Shadow-Seers,” however, though of to-day, may equally be of yesterday or to-morrow; and as for “The Last Supper” or “The Fisher of Men,” they are of no time or date, for they are founded upon elemental facts which are modified but not transformed by the changing years.