Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [ , with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.