The Book of Lies

age, and apparently the author of these extraordin- ary poems realizes the fact, for his volume is privately printed.... Magnificent poems—pagan in their intensity and vividness of colouring.”— Oxford Magazine. The Soul of Osiris. 5s. ‘<The depth and volume and the passionate inten- sity of the feeling in many of these poems are un- mistakable, as are the frequent richness and vision- ary splendour of the imagery and the aptness and the transfiguring power of the rhythms.”—New York Nation. Mr. G. K. Chesterton also writes a_column and a quarter in praise of this book in the Daily News; we quote the following: ‘“To the side of a mind concerned with idle merriment [sic!] there is certainly something a little funny in Mr. Crowley’s passionate devotion to deities who bear such names as Mout, and Nuit, and Ra, and Shu, and Hormakhou. They do not seem to the English mind to lend themselves to pious exhilaration. Mr. Crowley says in the same poem: ‘The burden is too hard to bear; I took too adamant a cross; This sackcloth rends my soul to wear, My self-denial is as dross. O, Shu, that holdest up the sky, Hold up thy servant, lest he die!’ ** That our world-worn men of art should believe for a moment that moral salvation is possible and supremely important is an unmixed benefit. If Mr. Crowley and the new mystics think for one moment that an Egyptian desert is more mystic than an English meadow, that a palm tree is more poetic than a Sussex beech, that a broken temple of Osiris is more supernatural than a Baptist Chapel in Brixton, then they are sectarians. ... But 119