laboration with Lady Gregory that taught her her art, and so
profoundly influenced his. So informing is it that I quote it in full.

MY DEAR LADY GREGORY:--

I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your own.

When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and
Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I
heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little
chapters of the first edition of the "Celtic Twilight," and that is
how I began to write in the Irish way.

Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part
of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my
memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old
newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life.
The old tales were still alive for me, indeed, but with a new,
strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass until at last,
when I had finished "The Secret Rose," and was halfway through "The
Wind among the Reeds," a wise woman in her trance told me that my
inspiration was from the moon and that I should always live close
to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled
thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need
to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are
under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power
of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to
me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the
knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see
your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve
Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great
number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to
understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true
countenance of country life.

One night I had a dream, almost as distinct as a vision, of a
cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a
marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old
woman in a cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni
Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so
many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to
their death. I thought if I