The perfume of the rainbow, and other stories

Front matter

THE

PERFUME

OF THE

Preface

THIS is a book of dreams and delights gathered in many wanderings in by-ways of the Orient. It is an attempt to conserve the perfume of the rainbow where all the chorded colours are the spirits of the flowers that have perished on earth to live forever in the blue gardens of heaven. It is an effort to treasure a lost echo of the music of great sunsets and awful dawns breaking upon Himalayan peaks or burning on the reaches of enchanted rivers. It is the half-despairing struggle of the soul to voyage beyond dangerous seas and behold a loveliness enshrined in ancient palaces and temples with the dead ages strewn about them for wardens.

And because the rainbow shines sometimes against a livid cloud, I have told one story of horror, — one only, — that it may be remembered how in the Orient there is horror as well as beauty, and very near the surface. It lurks like a snake in a flower. If I dared to make a book of horror, it could be done. The truth is there.

That the perfume of the rainbow is faint and fleeting as the memory of a dream, that the music is a lost har¬ monic in empty air, that the soul returns all but dumb from the Quest, I know well. Words are a cup that beauty brims too soon, and the drink runs over and the thirsty sand swallows it.

Yet, even the remaining drops may perhaps give some far off passion of the Exquisite, the incommunicable.

L. Adams Beck Canada

I desire to tender my thanks to the Editors of The Atlantic Monthly , Asia, The Quest, The Eastern Bud¬ dhist and The Hibbert Journal in which magazines some of these stories were published. The others appear for the first time in this volume.

L. Adams Beck,

Canada