Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.

My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.