On my coming from the West to Edinburgh, for a few days, I found your very welcome and charming letter, among others forwarded to me from the Outlook Tower.

It gratifies me very much that you, whose work I so much admire and with whose aims and spirit I am in so keen sympathy, care so well for the “Hills of Dream.” These are hills where few inhabit, but comrade always knows comrade there—and so we are sure to meet one another, whether one carry a “London Rose” or a sheaf of half-barbaric Hill-Runes. It may interest you to know that the name which seems to puzzle so many people is (though it does exist as the name “Fiona,” not only in Ossian but at the present day, though rarely) the Gaelic diminutive of “Fionaghal” (i. e. Flora). For the rest—I was born more than a thousand years ago, in the remote region of Gaeldom known as the Hills of Dream. There I have lived the better part of my life, my father’s name was Romance, and that of my mother was Dream. I have no photograph of their abode, which is just under the quicken-arch immediately west of the sunset-rainbow. You will easily find it. Nor can I send you a photograph of myself. My last fell among the dew-wet heather, and is now doubtless lining the cells of the wild bees.

All this authentic information I gladly send you!

I owe you a letter for a long time, and can only promise to amend and be more prompt in future. I have had a busy autumn, always trying to make myself do more work than my disposition will permit, and at such times I am the worst of correspondents. I have just finished a certain speech in The Shadowy Waters, my new poem, and have gone to The Café du Musée de Cluny to smoke and read the Irish news in the Times. I should say I wrote about your book of poems as you will have seen in the Bookman. I have just now a plan I want to ask you about? Our Irish Literary and Political literary organisations are pretty complete (I am trying to start a Young Ireland Society, among the Irish here in Paris at the moment) and I think it would be very possible to get up Celtic plays through these Societies. They would be far more effective than lectures and might do more than anything else we can do to make the Irish Scotch and other Celts recognise their solidarity. My own plays are too elaborate, I think, for a start, and have also the disadvantage that I cannot urge my own work in committee. If we have one or two short direct prose plays, of (say) a mythological and folklore kind, by you and by some writer (I may be able to move O’Grady, I have already spoken to him about it urgently) I feel sure we could get the Irish Literary Society to make a start. They have indeed for some time talked of doing my Land of Heart’s Desire. My own theory of poetical or legendary drama is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting. One should design a scene, which would be an accompaniment not a reflection of the text. This method would have the further advantage of being fairly cheap, and altogether novel. The acting should have an equivalent distance to that of the play from common realities. The plays might be almost, in some cases, modern mystery plays. Your Last Supper, for instance, would make such a play, while your story in The Savoy would arrange as a strong play of merely human tragedy. I shall try my own hand possibly at some short prose plays also, but not yet. I merely suggest these things because they are a good deal on my mind, and not that I wish to burden your already full hands. My “Shadowy Waters” is magical and mystical beyond anything I have done. It goes but slowly however, and I have had to recast all I did in Ireland some years ago. Mr. Sharp heard some of it in London in its first very monotonous form. I wish to make it a kind of grave ecstasy.

I am also at the start of a novel which moves between the Islands of Aran and Paris, and shall have to go again to Aran about it. After these books I start a long cherished project—a poetical version of the great Celtic epic tale Deirdre, Cuchullin at the Ford, and Cuchullin’s death, and Dermot and Grainne. I have some hopes that Mr. Sharp will come to Paris on his way back to England. I have much to talk over with him, I am feeling more and more every day that our Celtic movement is approaching a new phase. Our instrument is sufficiently prepared as far as Ireland is concerned, but the people are less so, and they can only be stirred by the imagination of a very few acting on all.

My book The Secret Rose was to have been out in December but it has been postponed till February. If I have any earlier copies you shall have one. I am specially curious to know what you think of a story called “The Adoration of the Magi” which is a half prophecy of a very veiled kind.

“I am not going to lament that even the desire to think-out anything has left me—much less the wish to write—for I am sure that is all in the order of the day towards betterness. But I do now fully realise that I must give up everything to getting back my old buoyancy and nervous strength—and that prolonged rest and open air are the paramount needs....

However, enough of this, henceforth I hope to have to think of and report on the up-wave only.

I am seated in a little room close to the window—and as I look out I first see the boughs of a gigantic sycamore through which the mistral is roaring with a noise like a gale at sea. Beyond this is a line of cypresses, and apparently within a stone’s throw are the extraordinary wildly fantastic mountain-peaks of St. Remy. I have never seen anything like them. No wonder they are called the Dolomites of France. They are, too, in aspect unspeakably ancient and remote.

We are practically in the country, and in every way, with its hill-air and beauty, the change from Tarascon is most welcome.... There is a strange but singularly fascinating blend of north and south here just now. The roar of the mistral has a wild wintry sound, and the hissing of the wood fire is also suggestive of the north: and then outside there are the unmistakable signs of the south and those fantastic unreal like hills. I never so fully recognise how intensely northern I am than when I am in the south....”

January 1st, 1897.—A day of extreme beauty at Sainte-Maxime (Var). In the morning wrote letters etc., and then walked into Sainte-Maxime and posted them, and sent a telegram to Elizabeth, to be delivered at dinner time, with New Year greetings and Fair Wishes.

Worked at “Ahez the Pale,” and, having finished the revision of it from first to last, did it up with “The Archer,” and then sent (with long letter of general instructions about the re-issue of F. M.’s tales in 3 vols., Spiritual Tales, Barbaric Tales, and Tragic Romances) to Lilian Rea, at the Outlook Tower.

After dinner went a long walk by the sea. Noticed a peculiarity by which tho’ the sea was dead calm, and on the eastern side of the littoral of Ste. Maxime made hardly a ripple, the noise on the further side was like that of a rushing train or of a wind among pinewoods. I walked round, and found oily waves beating heavily on the shore. Tidal, possibly. Expenses today: Letters 3.90, Telegrams 5.90, Poor Man 30. Board &c., at hotel.

Total    ”    ”.

... What a whirl of excitement life is, just now. I am all on fire about the iniquities of this Turkish-Finance triumph over honour, chivalry, and the old-time sense that the world can be well lost. There are many other matters, too, for deep excitement—international, national, literary, artistic, personal. It is the season of sap, of the young life, of green fire. Heart-pulses are throbbing to the full: brains are effervescing under the strong ferment of the wine of life: the spiral flames of the spirit and the red flower of the flesh are fanned and consumed and recreated and fanned anew every hour of every day....

This is going to be a strange year in many ways: a year of spiritual flames moving to and fro, of wild vicissitudes for many souls and for the forces that move through the minds of men. The West will redden in a new light—the ‘west’ of the forlorn peoples who congregate among our isles in Ireland—‘the West’ of the dispeopled mind.

The common Soul is open—one can see certain shadows and lights as though in a mirror.... [The letter ends abruptly.]

... I find it almost impossible to attempt to tell you the varied and beautiful delights of this lovely place. ... The country is strange and fascinating—at once so austere, so remote, so unusual, and so characteristic....

Lord Morris, and Martin and I go off today “to show me the beauties of the wild coast of Clare.” It is glorious autumnal weather, with unclouded sky, and I am looking forward to the trip immensely. We leave at 11, and drive to Ardrahan, and there get a train southward into County Clare, and at Ennis catch a little loopline to the coast. Then for two hours we drive to the famous Cliffs of Moher, gigantic precipices facing the Atlantic—and then for two hours move round the wild headlands of Blackhead—and so, in the afternoon, to the beautiful Clare ‘spa’ of Lisdoonvarna, where we dine late and sleep. Next day we return by some famous Round Tower of antiquity, whose name I have forgotten. Another day soon we are to go into Galway, and to the Aran Isles.

On Thursday Yeats arrives, also Dr. Douglas Hyde, and possibly Standish O’Grady—and Lady Gregory, one of the moving spirits in this projected new Celtic Drama. She is my host’s nearest neighbour, and has a lovely place (Coole Park) about five miles southwest from here, near Gort. I drove there, with Sir N. G. yesterday, in a car, through a strange fascinating austere country.

The people here are distinct from any I have seen—and the women in particular are very striking with their great dark eyes, and lovely complexions and their picturesque ‘snoods.’

The accent is not very marked, and the voices are low and pleasant, and the people courteous to a high degree.

In the evening we had music—and so ended delightfully my first delightful day in the west....

I forgot to tell you that I arrived late—and of course at Athenry only—some 14 miles from here. I had to wait some time till a car could be got—and what a drive I had! The man said that “Plaze God, he would have me at Tull-lyra before the gintry had given me up entoirely”—and he was as good as his word! The night was dark, and the roads near Athenry awful after the recent gale and rains—and it was no joke to hold on to the car. Whenever we came to a particularly bad bit (and I declared afterwards that he took some of the stone dykes at a leap) he cried—“Now thin yer honour, whin I cry Whiroo! you hould on an’ trust to God”—and then came his wild Whiroo! and the horse seemed to spring from the car, and the jarvey and I to be flying alongside, and my rope-bound luggage to be kicking against the stars—and then we came down with a thud, and when I had a gasp of refound breath I asked if the road was as smooth and easy all the way, whereat my friend laughed genially and said “Be aisy at that now—shure we’re coming to the bad bit soon!” ...

Not far from here is a fairy-doctor, I am going to see him some day. It is strange that when one day Lady Gregory took one of Russell’s mystical drawings (I think of the Mōr Reega) and showed it to an old woman, she at once exclaimed that that was the “photograph” of the fairy queen she had often seen, only that the strange girdle of fan-flame was round her waist and not on her head as in the drawing. An old man here also has often met “the secret people,” and when asked to describe one strange “fairy lord” he has encountered more than once, it was so like G. R’s drawing that that was shown him among several others, and he at once picked it out!

It is a haunted land.

P. S. I have been thinking much over my long-projected consecutive work (i. e. as W. S.)—in five sequel books—on the drama of life as seen in the evolution of the dreams of youth—begun, indeed, over ten years ago in Paris—but presciently foregone till ten maturing years should pass.

But now the time has come when I may, and should, and indeed, now, must, write this Epic of Youth. That will be its general collective name—and it will interest you to know the now definitely fixt names of these five (and all very long) books; each to be distinct and complete in itself, yet all sequently connected: and organic and in the true sense dramatic evolution of some seven central types of men and women from youth to maturity and climax, along the high and low, levels.

Name: The Epic of Youth.
I. The Hunters of Wisdom.
II. The Tyranny of Dreams.
III. The Star of Fortune.
IV. The Daughters of Vengeance.
V. The Iron Gates.

This will take five years to do—so it is a big task to set, before the end of 1902!—especially as I have other work to do, and F. M.’s, herself as ambitious. But method, and maturer power and thought, can accomplish with far less nervous output, what otherwise was impossible, and only at a killing or at least perilous strain.

So wish me well!

I am so glad to be here, in this sunlight by the sea. Light and motion—what a joy these are. The eyes become devitalised in the pall of London gloom....

There is a glorious amplitude of light. The mind bathes in these illimitable vistas. Wind and Wave and Sun: how regenerative these elder brothers are.

Solomon says there is no delight like wisdom, and that wisdom is the heritage of age: but there is a divine unwisdom which is the heritage of youth—and I would rather be young for a year than wise for a cycle. There are some who live without the pulse of youth in the mind: on the day, in the hour, I no longer feel that quick pulse, I will go out like a blown flame. To be young; to keep young: that is the story and despair of life....

... After months of sickness, at one time at the gates of death, I am whirled back from the Iron Gates and am in the maelstrom again—fighting with mind and soul and body for that inevitable losing game which we call victory. Well, the hour waits: and for good or ill I put forth that which is in me. The Utmost for the Highest. There is that motto for all faithful failures....

I am busy of course. And so, too, our friend F. M.—with an elixir of too potent life. The flame is best: and the keener, the less obscured of smoke. So I believe: upon this I build. Cosmopolis will ere long have “The Wayfarer” of hers—Good Words “The Wells of Peace”—Harpers, something—Literature a spiritual ballad—and so forth. But her life thought is in another and stranger thing than she has done yet.[4] ... Your friend W. S. is busy too, with new and deeper and stronger work. The fugitive powers impel. I look eagerly to new work of yours: above all to what you colour with yourself. I care little for anything that is not quick with that volatile part of one which is the effluence of the spirit within. Write to me soon: by return best of all. You can help me—as I, I hope, can help you.

It is only the fullest and richest lives that know what the heart of loneliness is.

You are my comrade, and have my love,

... Yes, in essentials, we are all at one. We have both learned and unlearned so much, and we have come to see that we are wrought mysteriously by forces beyond ourselves, but in so seeing we know that there is a great and deep love that conquers even disillusion and disappointment....

Not all the wishing, not all the dreaming, not all the will and hope and prayer we summon can alter that within us which is stronger than ourselves. This is a hard lesson to learn for all of us, and most for a woman. We are brought up within such an atmosphere of conventional untruth to life that most people never even perceive the hopeless futility in the arbitrary ideals which are imposed upon us—and the result for the deeper natures, endless tragic miscarriage of love, peace, and hope. But, fortunately, those of us who to our own suffering do see only too clearly, can still strike out a nobler ideal—one that does not shrink from the deepest responsibilities and yet can so widen and deepen the heart and spirit with love that what else would be irremediable pain can be transmuted into hope, into peace, and even into joy.

People talk much of this and that frailty or this or that circumstance as being among the commonest disintegrants of happiness. But far more fatal for many of us is that supreme disintegrant, the Tyranny of Love—the love which is forever demanding as its due that which is wholly independent of bonds, which is as the wind which bloweth where it listeth or where it is impelled, by the Spirit. We are taught such hopeless lies. And so men and women start life with ideals which seem fair, but are radically consumptive: ideals that are not only bound to perish, but that could not survive. The man of fifty who could be the same as he was at twenty is simply a man whose mental and spiritual life stopped short while he was yet a youth. The woman of forty who could have the same outlook on life as the girl of 19 or 20 would never have been other than one ignominiously deceived or hopelessly self-sophisticated. This ought not to be—but it must be as long as young men and women are fed mentally and spiritually upon the foolish and cowardly lies of a false and corrupt conventionalism.

No wonder that so many fine natures, men and women, are wrought to lifelong suffering. They are started with impossible ideals: and while some can never learn that their unhappiness is the result, not of the falling short of others, but of the falsity of those ideals which they had so cherished—and while others learn first strength to endure the transmutations and then power to weld these to far nobler and finer uses and ends—for both there is suffering. Yet, even of that we make too much. We have all a tendency to nurse grief. The brooding spirit craves for the sunlight, but it will not leave the shadows. Often, Sorrow is our best ally.

The other night, tired, I fell asleep on my sofa. I dreamed that a beautiful spirit was standing beside me. He said: “My Brother, I have come to give you the supreme gift that will heal you and save you.” I answered eagerly: “Give it me—what is it?” And the fair radiant spirit smiled with beautiful solemn eyes, and blew a breath into the tangled garden of my heart—and when I looked there I saw the tall white Flower of Sorrow growing in the Sunlight.”

I have had a very happy and peaceful afternoon. The isolation, with sun and wind, were together like soft cream upon my nerves: and I suppose that within twenty minutes after I left the station I was not only serenely at peace with the world in general, but had not a perturbing thought. To be alone, alone ‘in the open’ above all, is not merely healing to me but an imperative necessity of my life—and the chief counter agent to the sap that almost every person exercises on me, unless obviated by frequent and radical interruption.

By the time I had passed through the village I was already ‘remote’ in dreams and thoughts and poignant outer enjoyment of the lovely actualities of sun and wind and the green life: and when I came to my favourite coign where, sheltered from the bite of the wind, I could overlook the sea (a mass of lovely, radiant, amethyst-shadowed, foam-swept water), I lay down for two restful happy hours in which not once a thought of London or of any one in it, or of any one living, came to me. This power of living absolutely in the moment is worth not only a crown and all that a crown could give, but is the secret of youth, the secret of life.

O how weary I am of the endless recurrence of the ordinary in the lives of most people—the beloved routine, the cherished monotonies, the treasured certainties. I grudge them to none: they seem incidental to the common weal: indeed they seem even made for happiness. But I know one wild heart at least to whom life must come otherwise, or not at all.

Today I took a little green leaf o’ thorn. I looked at the sun through it, and a dazzle came into my brain—and I wished, ah I wished I were a youth once more, and was ‘sun-brother’ and ‘star-brother’ again—to lie down at night, smelling the earth, and rise at dawn, smelling the new air out of the East, and know enough of men and cities to avoid both, and to consider little any gods ancient or modern, knowing well that there is only ‘The Red God’ to think of, he who lives and laughs in the red blood....

There is a fever of the ‘green life’ in my veins—below all the ordinary littlenesses of conventional life and all the common place of exterior: a fever that makes me ill at ease with people, even those I care for, that fills me with a weariness beyond words and a nostalgia for sweet impossible things.

This can be met in several ways—chiefly and best by the practical yoking of the imagination to the active mind—in a word, to work. If I can do this, well and good, either by forced absorption in contrary work (e. g. Cæsar of France), or by letting that go for the time and let the more creative instinct have free play: or by some radical change of environment: or again by some irresponsible and incalculable variation of work and brief day-absences.

At the moment, I am like a man of the hills held in fee: I am willing to keep my bond, to earn my wage, to hold to the foreseen: and yet any moment a kestrel may fly overhead, mocking me with a rock-echo, where only sun and wind and bracken live—or an eddy of wind may have the sough of a pine in it—and then, in a flash—there’s my swift brain-dazzle in answer, and all the rapid falling away of these stupid half-realities, and only a wild instinct to go to my own....

We are now in the south Zuyder Zee, with marvellous sky effects, and low lines of land in the distance. Looking back at Eiland Marken one sees six clusters of houses, at wide intervals, dropped casually into the sea.

We had a delightful time in that quaintest of old world places, where the women are grotesque, the men grotesquer, and the children grotesquest—as for the tubby, capped, gorgeous-garbed, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, imperturbable babies, they alone are worth coming to see....

... It has been a memorable time here. I have written some of my best work—including two or three of the new things for The Dominion of Dreams—viz. “The Rose of Flame,” “Honey of the Wild Bees,” and “The Secrets of the Night.”

What a glorious day it has been. The most beautiful I have ever seen at Pettycur I think. Cloudless blue sky, clear exquisite air tho’ cold, with a marvellous golden light in the afternoon. Arthur’s Seat, the Crags and the Castle and the 14 ranges of the Pentlands all clear-cut as steel, and the city itself visible in fluent golden light. The whole coast-line purple blue, down to Berwick Law and the Bass Rock, and the Isle of May 16 miles out in the north sea.

And now I listen to the gathering of the tidal waters under the stars. There is an infinite solemnity—a hush, something sacred and wonderful. A benediction lies upon the world. Far off I hear the roaming wind. Thoughts and memories crowd in on me. Here I have lived and suffered—here I have touched the heights—here I have done my best. And now, here, I am going through a new birth.

‘Sic itur ad astral!’

I had no idea that you were in England, and had no means of finding your address.

You read only a portion of Aylwin—as far, I think, as the discovery that Winifred had been the model of Wilderspin. I always intended to send you other portions, but procrastination ruined my good intentions. You and my dear friend Mrs. Sharp were very kind to it, I remember, and this encourages me to hope that when you come to read it in its entirety, you will like it better than ever. Although it is of course primarily a love-story, and, as such, will be read by the majority of readers, it is intended to be the pronouncement of something like a new gospel—the gospel of love as the great power which stands up and confronts a materialistic cosmogony and challenges it and conquers it. This gospel of course is more fully expressed in “The Coming of Love” of which I send you a copy. “The Coming of Love” is of course a sequel to Aylwin, although, for certain reasons, it preceded in publication the novel. Aylwin appears in the last year of the present century, and I had a certain object in delaying it for a little while longer because I believe that should it have more than an ephemeral existence as to which I am of course very doubtful, it will appeal fifty years hence to fifty people where it now only appeals to one. I cannot think that, when a man has felt the love-passion as deeply as Aylwin feels it, he will find it possible, whatever physical science may prove, to accept a materialistic theory of the universe. He must either commit suicide or become a maniac.... Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin, the Tarno Rye of “The Coming of Love,” spring from the same Romany ancestors and they inherited therefore the most passionate blood in the Western World. Each of them is driven to a peculiar spiritualistic cosmogony by the love of a girl—Winifred Wynne and Rhona Boswell, though the two girls are the exact opposite of each other in temperament.

But you really must let me get a glimpse of you somehow before you leave England again.