Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by. And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time...

Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness. It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms ...

When the travellers from London entered Arcady they lamented one to another the death of Pan. And anon they saw him lying stiff and still. Horned Pan was still and the dew was on his fur; he had not t...

I saw the other day the Sphinx’s painted face. She had painted her face in order to ogle Time. And he has spared no other painted face in all the world but hers. Delilah was younger than she, and Deli...

All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row, twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things, but thinking only of Summer and the South, for Autumn was afoot and the North wind wai...

“Way for us,” said the North Wind as he came down the sea on an errand of old Winter. And he saw before him the grey silent fog that lay along the tides. “Way for us,” said the North Wind, “O ineffect...

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost r...

I saw a workman fall with his scaffolding right from the summit of some vast hotel. And as he came down I saw him holding a knife and trying to cut his name on the scaffolding. He had time to try and ...

A young man came into an ornate restaurant at eight o’clock in London. He was alone, but two places had been laid at the table which was reserved for him. He had chosen the dinner very carefully, by l...

In the Olympian courts Love laughed at Death, because he was unsightly, and because She couldn’t help it, and because he never did anything worth doing, and because She would. And Death hated being la...

Two dark young men in a foreign southern land sat at a restaurant table with one woman. And on the woman’s plate was a small orange which had an evil laughter in its heart. And both of the men would b...

It was the voice of the flowers on the West wind, the lovable, the old, the lazy West wind, blowing ceaselessly, blowing sleepily, going Greecewards. “The woods have gone away, they have fallen and le...

Once Time as he prowled the world, his hair grey not with weakness but with dust of the ruin of cities, came to a furniture shop and entered the Antique department. And there he saw a man darkening th...

I was in the predestined 11:08 from Goraghwood to Drogheda, when I suddenly saw the city. It was a little city in a valley, and only seemed to have a little smoke, and the sun caught the smoke and tur...

Thus spake the mountains: “Behold us, even us; the old ones, the grey ones, that wear the feet of Time. Time on our rocks shall break his staff and stumble: and still we shall sit majestic, even as no...

As he crawled from the tombs of the fallen a worm met with an angel. And together they looked upon the kings and kingdoms, and youths and maidens and the cities of men. They saw the old men heavy in t...

The poet came unto a great country in which there were no songs. And he lamented gently for the nation that had not any little foolish songs to sing to itself at evening. And at last he said: “I will ...

I saw an unclean-feeder by the banks of the river of Time. He crouched by orchards numerous with apples in a happy land of flowers; colossal barns stood near which the ancients had stored with grain, ...

A demagogue and a demimondaine chanced to arrive together at the gate of Paradise. And the Saint looked sorrowfully at them both. “Why were you a demagogue?” he said to the first. “Because,” said the ...

I dreamt that I went back to the hills I knew, whence on a clear day you can see the walls of Ilion and the plains of Roncesvalles. There used to be woods along the tops of those hills with clearings ...

I know a roadside where the wild rose blooms with a strange abundance. There is a beauty in the blossoms too of an almost exotic kind, a taint of deeper pink that shocks the Puritan flowers. Two hundr...

It may be that I dreamed this. So much at least is certain⁠—that I turned one day from the traffic of a city, and came to its docks and saw its slimy wharves going down green and steep into the water,...

King Karna-Vootra sitting on his throne commanding all things said: “I very clearly saw last night the queenly Vava-Nyria. Though partly she was hidden by great clouds that swept continually by her, r...

They saw a little ship that was far at sea and that went by the name of the Petite Espérance. And because of its uncouth rig and its lonely air and the look that it had of coming from strangers’ lands...

Fame as she walked at evening in a city saw the painted face of Notoriety flaunting beneath a gas-lamp, and many kneeled unto her in the dirt of the road. “Who are you?” Fame said to her. “I am Fame,”...

For a long time there was doubt with acrimony among the beasts as to whether the Hare or the Tortoise could run the swifter. Some said the Hare was the swifter of the two because he had such long ears...

I heard it said that far away from here, on the wrong side of the deserts of Cathay and in a country dedicate to winter, are all the years that are dead. And there a certain valley shuts them in and h...

There was once an earnest Puritan who held it wrong to dance. And for his principles he labored hard, his was a zealous life. And there loved him all of those who hated the dance; and those that loved...

“The swans are singing again,” said to one another the gods. And looking downwards, for my dreams had taken me to some fair and far Valhalla, I saw below me an iridescent bubble not greatly larger tha...

At a street corner sat, and played with a wind, Winter disconsolate. Still tingled the fingers of the passersby and still their breath was visible, and still they huddled their chins into their coats ...

It had been prophesied of old and foreseen from the ancient days that its enemy would come upon Thlūnrāna. And the date of its doom was known and the gate by which it would enter, yet none had prophes...

Once in a tavern Man met face to skull with Death. Man entered gaily but Death gave no greeting, he sat with his jowl morosely over an ominous wine. “Come, come,” said Man, “we have been antagonists l...

Going down Picadilly one day and nearing Grosvenor Place I saw, if my memory is not at fault, some workmen with their coats off⁠—or so they seemed. They had pickaxes in their hands and wore corduroy t...

When that happened which had been so long in happening and the world hit a black, uncharted star, certain tremendous creatures out of some other world came peering among the cinders to see if there we...

In time as well as space my fancy roams far from here. It led me once to the edge of certain cliffs that were low and red and rose up out of a desert: a little way off in the desert there was a city. ...

Death was sick. But they brought him bread that the modern bakers make, whitened with alum, and the tinned meats of Chicago, with a pinch of our modern substitute for salt. They carried him into the d...

I had from a friend an old outlandish stone, a little swine-faced idol to whom no one prayed. And when I saw his melancholy case as he sat cross-legged at receipt of prayer, holding a little scourge t...

There was a woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx. So she besought them t...

One’s spirit goes further in dreams than it does by day. Wandering once by night from a factory city I came to the edge of Hell. The place was foul with cinders and cast-off things, and jagged, half-b...

She went to the idol-shop in Moleshill Street, where the old man mumbles, and said: “I want a god to worship when it is wet.” The old man reminded her of the heavy penalties that rightly attach to ido...

The mist said unto the mist: “Let us go up into the Downs.” And the mist came up weeping. And the mist went into the high places and the hollows. And clumps of trees in the distance stood ghostly in t...

He was all in black, but his friend was dressed in brown, members of two old families. “Is there any change in the way you build your houses?” said he in black. “No change,” said the other. “And you?”...

I was climbing round the perilous outside of the Palace of Colquonhombros. So far below me that in the tranquil twilight and clear air of those lands I could only barely see them lay the craggy tops o...

The old man with a hammer and the one-eyed man with a spear were seated by the roadside talking as I came up the hill. “It isn’t as though they hadn’t asked us,” the one with the hammer said. “There a...

Through the streets of Coventry one winter’s night strode a triumphant spirit. Behind him stooping, unkempt, utterly ragged, wearing the clothes and look that outcasts have, whining, weeping, reproach...

As the poet passed the thorn-tree the blackbird sang. “How ever do you do it?” the poet said, for he knew bird language. “It was like this,” said the blackbird. “It really was the most extraordinary t...

One wandering nigh Parnassus chasing hares heard the high Muses. “Take us a message to the Golden Town.” Thus sang the Muses. But the man said: “They do not call to me. Not to such as me speak the Mus...

And at last Man raised on high the final glory of his civilization, the towering edifice of the ultimate city. Softly beneath him in the deeps of the earth purred his machinery fulfilling all his need...

They built their gorgeous home, their city of glory, above the lair of the earthquake. They built it of marble and gold in the shining youth of the world. There they feasted and fought and called thei...

When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept. “If only,” he said, “this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in you...

“Seeing,” they said, “that old-time Pan is dead, let us now make a tomb for him and a monument, that the dreadful worship of long ago may be remembered and avoided by all.” So said the people of the e...

Returning late one night from roaming amongst the stars I came on Mother Earth sitting all dark in Space, murmuring tales of her children. “Dreams and battles,” she said. “Dreams and battles.” I heard...

This story was not included in the original British edition. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩ This story was not included in the original American edition. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩...