Theatre," volumes containing "Where there is Nothing," "The Hour-Glass," "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and "A Pot of Broth," that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings of that collaboration 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.
