endship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or
described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable
persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends of my
youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian's rights. They were
artists and writers and certain among them men of genius, and the life of
a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment
that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued
personality that it thought so. I have said all the good I know and all
the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to understanding._

_W. B. YEATS._

_May, 1922.
Thoor Ballylee._

CONTENTS

PAGE

BOOK I FOUR YEARS 1887-1891 3

BOOK II IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL 83

BOOK III HODOS CAMELIONIS 135

BOOK IV THE TRAGIC GENERATION 157

BOOK V THE STIRRING OF THE BONES 225

BOOK I FOUR YEARS--1887-1891

THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL

_FOUR YEARS_ 1887-1891

I

At the end of the 'eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters
and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in
a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble
mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden
shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there,
when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees
casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite
movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken
the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were
said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that
was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember
feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little
seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed
them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house,
called The Tabard after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public
house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the
Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big
red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw
the wooden balustrade that