“My wretched dragon is perplexed.”

“Her TriumphI did the dragon's will until you cameBecause I had fancied love a casualImprovisation, or a settled gameThat followed if I let the kerchief fall:Those deeds were best that gave the minute wingsAnd heavenly music if they gave it wit;And then you stood among the dragon-rings.I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered itAnd broke the chain and set my ankles free,Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;And now we stare astonished at the sea,And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.”

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”

“I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.”

“Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half light,I would spread the cloths under your feet:But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

“I bring you with reverent handsThe books of my numberless dreams.”

“Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [The Works of William Blake, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would The Countess Kathleen [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”