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Title: The Cutting of an Agate

Author: William Butler Yeats

Release Date: July 6, 2010 [EBook #33094]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE

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

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

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

THE CUTTING
OF AN AGATE

BY
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

AUTHOR OF "IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL," ETC.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1912

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1912,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1912.

PREFACE

When I wrote the essay on Edmund Spenser the company of Irish players
who have now their stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin had been
founded, but gave as yet few performances in a twelvemonth. I could let
my thought stray where it would, and even give a couple of summers to
_The Faerie Queene_; while for some ten years now I have written little
verse and no prose that did not arise out of some need of those players
or some thought suggested by their work, or was written in the defence
of some friend whose life has been a part of the movement of events
which is creating a new Ireland unintelligible to an old Ireland that
watches with anger or indifference. The detailed defence of plays and
players, published originally in _Samhain_, the occasional periodical of
the theatre, and now making some three hundred pages of Mr. Bullen's
collected edition of my writings, is not here, but for the most part an
exposition of principles, whether suggested by my own work or by the
death of friend or fellow-worker, that, intended for no great public,
has been printed and published from a Hand Press which my sisters manage