Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/92

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Ideas of Good and Evil.

where there was an island with tame eagles; and one day somebody read me some verses and said they made him think of that old house where he had been very happy. The verses ran in my head for years and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and I am not certain that I know a better even now. They were those first dozen verses of Golden Wings that begin—

'Midways of a walled garden
In the happy poplar land
Did an ancient castle stand,
With an old knight for a warden.


Many scarlet bricks there were
In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.


On the bricks the green moss grew,
Yellow lichen on the stone,
Over which red apples shone;
Little war that castle knew.'

When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his description

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