“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-containedI stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition,They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,No one kneels to another, nor to one of his kind that lived […]

I am a part of all that I have met:Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’Gleams that untraveled world …..……. Come, my friends,‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.–Ulysses We are no longer children as we were in the beginning. The spirit which, prompted by some divine intent, flung itself long ago into […]

They torture me also.–Krishna The night was wet: and, as I was moving down the streets, my mind was also journeying on a way of its own, and the things which were bodily present before me were no less with me in my unseen traveling. Every now and then a transfer would take place, and […]

I heard that a strange woman, dwelling on the western coast, who had the repute of healing by faery power, said a little before she died, “There’s a cure for all things in the well at Ballykeele”: and I know not why at first, but her words lingered with me and repeated themselves again and […]

As one of those who believe that the literature of a country is for ever creating a new soul among its people, I do not like to think that literature with us must follow an inexorable law of sequence, and gain a spiritual character only after the bodily passions have grown weary and exhausted themselves. […]

For a generation the Irish bards have endeavored to live in a palace of art, in chambers hung with the embroidered cloths and made dim with pale lights and Druid twilights, and the melodies they most sought for were half soundless. The art of an early age began softly, to end its songs with a […]

When I was a boy I knew another who has since become famous and who has now written Reveries over Childhood and Youth. I searched the pages to meet the boy I knew and could not find him. He has told us what he saw and what he remembered of others, but from himself he […]

When I was asked to write “anything” about Yeats, our Irish poet, my thoughts were like rambling flocks that have no shepherd, and without guidance my rambling thoughts have run anywhere. I confess I have feared to enter or linger too long in the many-colored land of Druid twilights and tunes. A beauty not our […]

Lady Gregory, a fairy godmother, has given to Young Ireland the gift of her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which should be henceforward the book of its dream. I do not doubt but there will be a great change in the next generation, for the character of many children will have grown to maturity brooding over the […]

“The Red Branch ought not to be staged…. That literature ought not to be produced for popular consumption for the edification of the crowd…. I say to you drop this thing at your peril…. You may succeed in degrading Irish ideals, and banishing the soul of the land. … Leave the heroic cycles alone, and […]

In this age we read so much that we lay too great a burden on the imagination. It is unable to create images which are the spiritual equivalent of the words on the printed page, and reading becomes for too many an occupation of the eye rather than of the mind. How rarely, out of […]

I Speak to you, brother, because you have spoken to me, or rather you have spoken for me. I am a native of Ulster. So far back as I can trace the faith of my forefathers they held the faith for whose free observance you are afraid. I call you brother, for so far as […]

It is unjust to an artist to write on the spur of the moment of his work–of the just seen picture which pleases or displeases. For what instantly delights the eye may never win its way into the heart, and what repels at first may steal later on into the understanding, and find its interpretation […]

The art of Hone and the elder Yeats, while in spirit filled with a sentiment which was the persistence of ancient moods into modern times, still has not the external characteristics of Gaeldom; but looking at the pictures of the younger Yeats it seemed to me that for the first time we had something which […]

A LECTURE ON THE ART OF G. F. WATTS After the publication of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies the writer who ventures to speak of art and literature in the same breath needs some courage. Since the death of Whistler, his opinions about the independence of art from the moral ideas with which literature […]

As I grow older I get more songless. I am now exiled irrevocably from the Country of the Young, but I hope I can listen without jealousy and even with delight to those who still make music in the enchanted land. I often searched in the “Poet’s Corner” of the country papers with a wild […]

I have often wondered whether there is not something wrong in our religious systems in that the same ritual, the same doctrines, the same aspirations are held to be sufficient both for men and women. The tendency everywhere is to obliterate distinctions, and if a woman be herself she is looked upon unkindly. She rarely […]

It has been my dream for many years that I might at some time dwell in a cabin on the hillside in this dear and living land of ours, and there I would lay my head in the lap of a serene nature, and be on friendly terms with the winds and mountains who hold […]

Prophetic I am told when a gun is fired it recoils with almost as much force as urges forward the projectile. It is the triumph of the military engineer that he anticipates and provides for this recoil when designing the weapon. Nations prepare for war, but do not, as the military engineer in his sphere […]

In that cycle of history which closed in 1914, but which seems now to the imagination as far sunken behind time as Babylon or Samarcand, it was customary at the festival of the Incarnation to forego our enmities for a little and allow freer play to the spiritual in our being. Since 1914 all things […]