characteristics, because William B. Yeats was, I thought, bigger than Ireland herself, and what I was afraid of was the disillusionment; it was not the immediate question with me to know how much Celtic would be left if Yeats were taken out from his poetry. I read somewhere his words-of discontent with his early poems as triviality or sentimentality; I have my opinion to feel only sorry for a poet who was sane and wise from the beginning. The time when one could act even silly would be doubly dear in one’s after-reflection; Yeats’ word of discontent may not be the exact word; what a pity even the poet, particularly when he is Irish, has had an occasion or two to play that sad art of criticism upon his own work. I see the sorrow at once universal, with no particular shape, commingled with the whisper and sigh of days and nature in quite a picturesque accentuation, in his early work, as if in my poetry of youth, at the moment when he might have thought, again as in my case, it was a spiritual flight to lose his own nationality, and that the imitation in the best sense or the joining to one indomitable general mood of
