Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Two hundred copies of this book have been printed. DISCOVERIES; A VOLUME OF ESSAYS BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. DUN EMER PRESS DUNDRUM MCMVII CONTENTS Prophet, Priest and King Page 1 Personality and the Intellectual Essences 5 The Musician and the Orator 9 A Banjo Player 10 The Looking-glass 11 The Tree of Life 12 The Praise of Old Wives' Tales 15 The Play of Modern Manners 16 Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own 18 Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was made a Poet 20 Concerning Saints and Artists 24 The Subject Matter of Drama 27 The Two Kinds of Asceticism 30 In the Serpent's Mouth 32 The Black and the White Arrows 33 His Mistress's Eyebrows 33 The Tresses of the Hair 35 A Tower on the Apennine 36 The Thinking of the Body 37 Religious Belief necessary to symbolic Art 39 The Holy Places 41 DISCOVERIES PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING The little theatrical company I write my plays for had come to a west of Ireland town and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for there was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring country house and arriving a little before the players, tried to open a window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment and presently a pane of glass and a part of the window frame came out in my hands. Everything in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked under my feet, and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform looked out of place, and yet the room was not really old, in spite of the musicians' gallery over the stage. It had been built by some romantic or philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago, and was a memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.