The Project Gutenberg EBook of Reveries over Childhood and Youth, by
William Butler Yeats

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Title: Reveries over Childhood and Youth

Author: William Butler Yeats

Release Date: August 4, 2010 [EBook #33348]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXVI

COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1916.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To those few people mainly personal friends who have read all that I have
written.

W. B. Y.

Preface

Sometimes when I remember a relative that I have been fond of, or a
strange incident of the past, I wander here and there till I have somebody
to talk to. Presently I notice that my listener is bored; but now that I
have written it out, I may even begin to forget it all. In any case,
because one can always close a book, my friend need not be bored.

I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I have
changed many things without my knowledge, for I am writing after so many
years, and have consulted neither friend nor letter nor old newspaper and
describe what comes oftenest into my memory.

I say this fearing that some surviving friend of my youth may remember
something in a different shape and be offended with my book.

Christmas Day, 1914.

REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

My first memories are fragmentary and isolated and contemporaneous, as
though one remembered vaguely some early day of the S