t that prophesies though with worn and failing voice
of the day when Quixote and Sancho Panza long estranged may once
again go out gaily into the bleak air. Ever since I began to write
I have awaited with impatience a linking, all Europe over, of the
hereditary knowledge of the countryside, now becoming known to us
through the work of wanderers and men of learning, with our old
lyricism so full of ancient frenzies and hereditary wisdom, a
yoking of antiquities, a marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Interesting, however, as these plays in prose are, and significant of
their author's desire to do work in a medium that was perhaps more
immediately acceptable to the audience of the National Dramatic Society
in its then culture, there is no doubt at all that the plays in verse
are nearer his heart. They are himself, and in all of the prose plays
there is a good deal of Lady Gregory. All this time that he was
collaborating in these prose plays he was still dreaming over "The
Shadowy Waters," retouching it, rearranging it, until it became in
detail a very different play from the play that was published under that
name in 1900. Its hero and heroine, Forgael and Dectora, are much as
they were then, their fateful meeting in misty northern seas remains the
central incident, and the climax is still their choice to be left alone
in the Viking ship at the world's end; but more than half the lines are
changed. "The Shadowy Waters" was staged in 1904, and with telling
weirdness, but like many another author's best-loved and most elaborated
work, it has not made the appeal of plays less favorite to him. Mr.
Yeats has written that he has been brooding over "The Shadowy Waters"
ever since he was a boy, and he told me, when I asked him once which
writing of his he cared most for, "That I was last working at, and then
'The Shadowy Waters.'" It is too much to say that it expresses the dream
of his life, but it is not too much to say that a dream that has haunted
all his life is told here, or half told, for dream such as this eludes
complete expression. "The Shadowy Waters" is a poem so long considered,
so often returned to, so loved and elaborated and worked over, so often
dreamed and redreamed, that one would expect to find in it its author's
_credo_, if its author is one who could hold to one confession of faith.
Few authors can, few authors should, and Mr. Yeats is not one of them
that can or should. He wrote o