I know how readily our poet forgets his own songs. I once quoted to him some early verses of his own as comment on something he had said. He asked eagerly "Who wrote that?" and when I said "Do you not remember?" he petulantly waved the poem aside for he had forsaken his past. Again at a later period he told me his early verses sometimes aroused him to a frenzy of dislike. Of the feelings which beset the young poet of genius little or nothing is revealed in this Reverie. Yet what would we not give for a book which would tell how beauty beset that youth in his walks about Dublin and Sligo; how the sensitive response to color, form, music and tradition began, how he came to recognize the moods which incarnated in him as immortal moods. Perhaps it is too much to expect from the creative imagination that it shall also be capable of exact and subtle analysis. In this work I walk down the streets of Dublin I walked with Yeats over thirty years ago. I mix with the people who then were living in the city, O'Leary, Taylor, Dowden, Hughes and the rest; but the poet himself does not walk with me. It is a new voice speaking of the past of others, pointing out the doorways entered by dead youth. The new voice has distinction and dignity of its own, and we are grateful for this history, others more so than myself, because most of what is written therein I knew already, and I wanted a secret which is not revealed. I wanted to know more about the working of the imagination which planted the little snow-white feet in the sally garden, and which heard the kettle on the hob sing peace into the breast, and was intimate with twilight and the creatures that move in the dusk and undergrowths, with weasel, heron, rabbit, hare, mouse and coney; which plucked the Flower of Immortality in the Island of Statues and wandered with Usheen in Timanogue. I wanted to know what all that magic-making meant to the magician, but he has kept his own secret, and I must be content and grateful to one who has revealed more of beauty than any other in his time. 1916 THE POETRY OF JAMES STEPHENS