It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.

It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.

The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.