It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?

I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.

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.

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.