'Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A
French alchemist said it had the right smell and the right
colour,' (The alchemist may have been Elephas Levi, who visited
England in the sixties, & would have said anything) 'but the first
effect of the elixir is that your nails fall out and your hair
falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a mistake and that
nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I meant to
drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other
day it had all dried up.'
XIX
I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that
it was my business in life to bean artist and a poet, and that
there could be no business comparable to that. I refused to read
books, and even to meet people who excited me to generalization,
but all to no purpose. I said my prayers much as in childhood,
though without the old regularity of hour and place, and I began
to pray that my imagination might somehow be rescued from
abstraction, and become as pre-occupied with life as had been the
imagination of Chaucer.
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