John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.

Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.

We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.

All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.

Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.