“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”

April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

So hand in hand with fitful March she lingers to beg the crowning grace of lifting with her pure and holy fingers the veil from April's face. Sweet, rosy April—laughing, sighing, waiting until the gateway swings, and she and Lent can kiss between the grating of Easter's tissue wings. Too brief the bliss—the parting comes with sorrow

April had come, that dawn of summer, fresh as all dawns, gay as all childhoods, and at times a little tearful like a real newborn. In this month, nature has certain enchanting gleams that pass from the sky, the clouds, the trees, the meadows, and the flowers, into our hearts.

In the course of the eighteenth century, alchemy perished in its own obscurity. Its method of explanation “obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius” (the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown) was incompatible with the spirit of enlightenment and particularly with the dawning science of chemistry towards the end of the century. But these two new intellectual forces only gave the coup de grace to alchemy. Its inner decay had begun at least a century earlier, at the time of Jakob Böhme, when many alchemists deserted their alembics and melting-pots and devoted themselves entirely to (Hermetic) philosophy. It was then that the chemist and the Hermetic philosopher parted company. Chemistry became natural science, whereas Hermetic philosophy lost the empirical ground from under its feet and aspired to bombastic allegories and inane speculations which were kept alive only by memories of a better time. This was a time when the mind of the alchemist was still grappling with the problems of matter, when the exploring consciousness was confronted by the dark void of the unknown, in which figures and laws were dimly perceived and attributed to matter although they really belonged to the psyche. Everything unknown and empty is filled with psychological projection; it is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter, or thinks he can see, is chiefly the data of his own unconscious which he is projecting into it. In other words, he encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious.