time of Shelley and of
Goethe; and in body and in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust
have looked at the end of his hundred years. In the credulity of our youth
we secretly wondered if he had not met with, perhaps even been taught by
some old man who had found the elixir. Nor did he undeceive us. "If you
find the elixir," he was accustomed to say, "you always look a few years
younger than the age at which you found it. If you find it at sixty you
will look fifty for a hundred years." None of us would have admitted that
we believed in stone or elixir, the old Oxfordshire clergyman excited no
belief, yet one among us certainly laboured with crucible or athanor. Ten
years ago I called upon an elderly solicitor, on some business, but at his
private house, and I remembered whose pupil he had been when I found among
the ashes of the hearth a little earthen pot. He pretended that he studied
alchemy that he might some day write its history, and I found when I
questioned others, that for twenty years there had been just such a little
pot among the ashes.

XXI

I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought it was my
business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there could be no
business comparable to that. I refused to read books and even to meet
people who excited me to generalization, all to no purpose. I said my
prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour
and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be
rescued from abstraction and became as preoccupied with life as had been
the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered
continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had
composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped
to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimentality through
my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I considered
impure. Even in practical life I only very gradually began to use
generalizations, that have since become the foundation of all I have done,
or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know all men may have been so timid,
for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we
shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from
opinions, caught up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life
goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us
victory, whether over ours