return to London I stayed at her house which is some four miles from Tillyra. I was in poor health, the strain of youth had been greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men, who must always I think find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides as I had done periodically for years, upon Hodos Camelionis. The first time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth year, when I tried to create a more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there through a novel that I could neither write nor cease to write which had Hodos Camelionis for its theme. My chief person was to see all the modern visionary sects pass before his bewildered eyes, as Flaubert's St Anthony saw the Christian sects, and I was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief person to create philosophic order. It was not that I do not love order, or that I lack capacity for it, but that, and not in the arts and the thought only, I outrun my strength. It is not so much that I choose too many elements, as that the possible unities themselves seem without number, like those angels, that in Henry More's paraphrase of the Schoolman's problem, dance spurred and booted upon the point of a needle. Perhaps fifty years ago I had been in less trouble, but what can one do when the age itself has come to Hodos Camelionis?
Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me from cottage to cottage to gather folk-belief tales of the fairies and the like and wrote down herself what we had gathered, considering that this work, in which one let others talk, and walked about the fields so much, would lie, to use a country phrase "Very light upon the mind." She asked me to return there the next year, and for years to come I was to spend my summers at her house. When I was in good health again, I found myself indolent, partly because I was affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked her to send me to my work every day at eleven, and at some other hour to my letters, rating me with idleness if need be, and I doubt if I should have done much with my life but for her firmness and her care. After a time though not very quickly, I recovered industry, though it has only been of late years that I have found it possible to face an hour's verse-writing without a preliminary struggle and much putting off.
Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock, and those above the waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps walk there again, are so deep in my affections that I dream about them at night; and yet the woods at Coole, though they do not come
