et, and began to remember lake water.
From the sudden remembrance came my poem _Innisfree_, my first lyric with
anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an
escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric
brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my
special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years
later I would not have written that first line with its conventional
archaism--"Arise and go"--nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing
another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it
was Gothic--"It is not very good," Morris had said, "but it is better than
anything else they have got and so they hate it"--I grew suddenly
oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, "There are miles and
miles of stone and brick all round me," and presently added, "If John the
Baptist or his like were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he
could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their
buildings empty," and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now,
so enlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a few
days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of Poggio's
_Liber Facetiarum_ or the _Hypneroto-machia_ of Poliphili for a publisher;
I forget which, for I copied both; and returned very pale to my troubled
family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity
found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need
no better. I was always planning some great gesture, putting the whole
world into one scale of the balance and my soul into the other and
imagining that the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty
years have passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave
the metropolis, without some like stimulant; and all after two or three,
or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood that
we achieve, if we do achieve, in little sedentary stitches as though we
were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I
could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most
haughty mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in
some far place "under the canopy ... i' the city of kites and crows."

In London I saw nothing good and constantly remembered that Ruskin had
said to some friend of my father's--"As I