On my coming from the West to Edinburgh, for a few days, I found your very welcome and charming letter, among others forwarded to me from the Outlook Tower.

It gratifies me very much that you, whose work I so much admire and with whose aims and spirit I am in so keen sympathy, care so well for the “Hills of Dream.” These are hills where few inhabit, but comrade always knows comrade there—and so we are sure to meet one another, whether one carry a “London Rose” or a sheaf of half-barbaric Hill-Runes. It may interest you to know that the name which seems to puzzle so many people is (though it does exist as the name “Fiona,” not only in Ossian but at the present day, though rarely) the Gaelic diminutive of “Fionaghal” (i. e. Flora). For the rest—I was born more than a thousand years ago, in the remote region of Gaeldom known as the Hills of Dream. There I have lived the better part of my life, my father’s name was Romance, and that of my mother was Dream. I have no photograph of their abode, which is just under the quicken-arch immediately west of the sunset-rainbow. You will easily find it. Nor can I send you a photograph of myself. My last fell among the dew-wet heather, and is now doubtless lining the cells of the wild bees.

All this authentic information I gladly send you!

I owe you a letter for a long time, and can only promise to amend and be more prompt in future. I have had a busy autumn, always trying to make myself do more work than my disposition will permit, and at such times I am the worst of correspondents. I have just finished a certain speech in The Shadowy Waters, my new poem, and have gone to The CafÉ du MusÉe de Cluny to smoke and read the Irish news in the Times. I should say I wrote about your book of poems as you will have seen in the Bookman. I have just now a plan I want to ask you about? Our Irish Literary and Political literary organisations are pretty complete (I am trying to start a Young Ireland Society, among the Irish here in Paris at the moment) and I think it would be very possible to get up Celtic plays through these Societies. They would be far more effective than lectures and might do more than anything else we can do to make the Irish Scotch and other Celts recognise their solidarity. My own plays are too elaborate, I think, for a start, and have also the disadvantage that I cannot urge my own work in committee. If we have one or two short direct prose plays, of (say) a mythological and folklore kind, by you and by some writer (I may be able to move O’Grady, I have already spoken to him about it urgently) I feel sure we could get the Irish Literary Society to make a start. They have indeed for some time talked of doing my Land of Heart’s Desire. My own theory of poetical or legendary drama is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting. One should design a scene, which would be an accompaniment not a reflection of the text. This method would have the further advantage of being fairly cheap, and altogether novel. The acting should have an equivalent distance to that of the play from common realities. The plays might be almost, in some cases, modern mystery plays. Your Last Supper, for instance, would make such a play, while your story in The Savoy would arrange as a strong play of merely human tragedy. I shall try my own hand possibly at some short prose plays also, but not yet. I merely suggest these things because they are a good deal on my mind, and not that I wish to burden your already full hands. My “Shadowy Waters” is magical and mystical beyond anything I have done. It goes but slowly however, and I have had to recast all I did in Ireland some years ago. Mr. Sharp heard some of it in London in its first very monotonous form. I wish to make it a kind of grave ecstasy.

I am also at the start of a novel which moves between the Islands of Aran and Paris, and shall have to go again to Aran about it. After these books I start a long cherished project—a poetical version of the great Celtic epic tale Deirdre, Cuchullin at the Ford, and Cuchullin’s death, and Dermot and Grainne. I have some hopes that Mr. Sharp will come to Paris on his way back to England. I have much to talk over with him, I am feeling more and more every day that our Celtic movement is approaching a new phase. Our instrument is sufficiently prepared as far as Ireland is concerned, but the people are less so, and they can only be stirred by the imagination of a very few acting on all.

My book The Secret Rose was to have been out in December but it has been postponed till February. If I have any earlier copies you shall have one. I am specially curious to know what you think of a story called “The Adoration of the Magi” which is a half prophecy of a very veiled kind.

“I am not going to lament that even the desire to think-out anything has left me—much less the wish to write—for I am sure that is all in the order of the day towards betterness. But I do now fully realise that I must give up everything to getting back my old buoyancy and nervous strength—and that prolonged rest and open air are the paramount needs....

However, enough of this, henceforth I hope to have to think of and report on the up-wave only.

I am seated in a little room close to the window—and as I look out I first see the boughs of a gigantic sycamore through which the mistral is roaring with a noise like a gale at sea. Beyond this is a line of cypresses, and apparently within a stone’s throw are the extraordinary wildly fantastic mountain-peaks of St. Remy. I have never seen anything like them. No wonder they are called the Dolomites of France. They are, too, in aspect unspeakably ancient and remote.

We are practically in the country, and in every way, with its hill-air and beauty, the change from Tarascon is most welcome.... There is a strange but singularly fascinating blend of north and south here just now. The roar of the mistral has a wild wintry sound, and the hissing of the wood fire is also suggestive of the north: and then outside there are the unmistakable signs of the south and those fantastic unreal like hills. I never so fully recognise how intensely northern I am than when I am in the south....”

January 1st, 1897.—A day of extreme beauty at Sainte-Maxime (Var). In the morning wrote letters etc., and then walked into Sainte-Maxime and posted them, and sent a telegram to Elizabeth, to be delivered at dinner time, with New Year greetings and Fair Wishes.

Worked at “Ahez the Pale,” and, having finished the revision of it from first to last, did it up with “The Archer,” and then sent (with long letter of general instructions about the re-issue of F. M.’s tales in 3 vols., Spiritual Tales, Barbaric Tales, and Tragic Romances) to Lilian Rea, at the Outlook Tower.

After dinner went a long walk by the sea. Noticed a peculiarity by which tho’ the sea was dead calm, and on the eastern side of the littoral of Ste. Maxime made hardly a ripple, the noise on the further side was like that of a rushing train or of a wind among pinewoods. I walked round, and found oily waves beating heavily on the shore. Tidal, possibly. Expenses today: Letters 3.90, Telegrams 5.90, Poor Man 30. Board &c., at hotel.

Total””.

... What a whirl of excitement life is, just now. I am all on fire about the iniquities of this Turkish-Finance triumph over honour, chivalry, and the old-time sense that the world can be well lost. There are many other matters, too, for deep excitement—international, national, literary, artistic, personal. It is the season of sap, of the young life, of green fire. Heart-pulses are throbbing to the full: brains are effervescing under the strong ferment of the wine of life: the spiral flames of the spirit and the red flower of the flesh are fanned and consumed and recreated and fanned anew every hour of every day....

This is going to be a strange year in many ways: a year of spiritual flames moving to and fro, of wild vicissitudes for many souls and for the forces that move through the minds of men. The West will redden in a new light—the ‘west’ of the forlorn peoples who congregate among our isles in Ireland—‘the West’ of the dispeopled mind.

The common Soul is open—one can see certain shadows and lights as though in a mirror.... [The letter ends abruptly.]

... I find it almost impossible to attempt to tell you the varied and beautiful delights of this lovely place. ... The country is strange and fascinating—at once so austere, so remote, so unusual, and so characteristic....

Lord Morris, and Martin and I go off today “to show me the beauties of the wild coast of Clare.” It is glorious autumnal weather, with unclouded sky, and I am looking forward to the trip immensely. We leave at 11, and drive to Ardrahan, and there get a train southward into County Clare, and at Ennis catch a little loopline to the coast. Then for two hours we drive to the famous Cliffs of Moher, gigantic precipices facing the Atlantic—and then for two hours move round the wild headlands of Blackhead—and so, in the afternoon, to the beautiful Clare ‘spa’ of Lisdoonvarna, where we dine late and sleep. Next day we return by some famous Round Tower of antiquity, whose name I have forgotten. Another day soon we are to go into Galway, and to the Aran Isles.

On Thursday Yeats arrives, also Dr. Douglas Hyde, and possibly Standish O’Grady—and Lady Gregory, one of the moving spirits in this projected new Celtic Drama. She is my host’s nearest neighbour, and has a lovely place (Coole Park) about five miles southwest from here, near Gort. I drove there, with Sir N. G. yesterday, in a car, through a strange fascinating austere country.

The people here are distinct from any I have seen—and the women in particular are very striking with their great dark eyes, and lovely complexions and their picturesque ‘snoods.’

The accent is not very marked, and the voices are low and pleasant, and the people courteous to a high degree.

In the evening we had music—and so ended delightfully my first delightful day in the west....

I forgot to tell you that I arrived late—and of course at Athenry only—some 14 miles from here. I had to wait some time till a car could be got—and what a drive I had! The man said that “Plaze God, he would have me at Tull-lyra before the gintry had given me up entoirely”—and he was as good as his word! The night was dark, and the roads near Athenry awful after the recent gale and rains—and it was no joke to hold on to the car. Whenever we came to a particularly bad bit (and I declared afterwards that he took some of the stone dykes at a leap) he cried—“Now thin yer honour, whin I cry Whiroo! you hould on an’ trust to God”—and then came his wild Whiroo! and the horse seemed to spring from the car, and the jarvey and I to be flying alongside, and my rope-bound luggage to be kicking against the stars—and then we came down with a thud, and when I had a gasp of refound breath I asked if the road was as smooth and easy all the way, whereat my friend laughed genially and said “Be aisy at that now—shure we’re coming to the bad bit soon!” ...

Not far from here is a fairy-doctor, I am going to see him some day. It is strange that when one day Lady Gregory took one of Russell’s mystical drawings (I think of the Mor Reega) and showed it to an old woman, she at once exclaimed that that was the “photograph” of the fairy queen she had often seen, only that the strange girdle of fan-flame was round her waist and not on her head as in the drawing. An old man here also has often met “the secret people,” and when asked to describe one strange “fairy lord” he has encountered more than once, it was so like G. R’s drawing that that was shown him among several others, and he at once picked it out!

It is a haunted land.

P. S. I have been thinking much over my long-projected consecutive work (i. e. as W. S.)—in five sequel books—on the drama of life as seen in the evolution of the dreams of youth—begun, indeed, over ten years ago in Paris—but presciently foregone till ten maturing years should pass.

But now the time has come when I may, and should, and indeed, now, must, write this Epic of Youth. That will be its general collective name—and it will interest you to know the now definitely fixt names of these five (and all very long) books; each to be distinct and complete in itself, yet all sequently connected: and organic and in the true sense dramatic evolution of some seven central types of men and women from youth to maturity and climax, along the high and low, levels.

Name: The Epic of Youth.
I. The Hunters of Wisdom.
II. The Tyranny of Dreams.
III. The Star of Fortune.
IV. The Daughters of Vengeance.
V. The Iron Gates.

This will take five years to do—so it is a big task to set, before the end of 1902!—especially as I have other work to do, and F. M.’s, herself as ambitious. But method, and maturer power and thought, can accomplish with far less nervous output, what otherwise was impossible, and only at a killing or at least perilous strain.

So wish me well!

I am so glad to be here, in this sunlight by the sea. Light and motion—what a joy these are. The eyes become devitalised in the pall of London gloom....

There is a glorious amplitude of light. The mind bathes in these illimitable vistas. Wind and Wave and Sun: how regenerative these elder brothers are.

Solomon says there is no delight like wisdom, and that wisdom is the heritage of age: but there is a divine unwisdom which is the heritage of youth—and I would rather be young for a year than wise for a cycle. There are some who live without the pulse of youth in the mind: on the day, in the hour, I no longer feel that quick pulse, I will go out like a blown flame. To be young; to keep young: that is the story and despair of life....