The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.

All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

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.

I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.

There is only one romance the Soul's.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.