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.) REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK MCMXVI COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1916. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. To those few people mainly personal friends who have read all that I have written. W. B. Y. Preface Sometimes when I remember a relative that I have been fond of, or a strange incident of the past, I wander here and there till I have somebody to talk to. Presently I notice that my listener is bored; but now that I have written it out, I may even begin to forget it all. In any case, because one can always close a book, my friend need not be bored. I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge, for I am writing after so many years, and have consulted neither friend nor letter nor old newspaper and describe what comes oftenest into my memory. I say this fearing that some surviving friend of my youth may remember something in a different shape and be offended with my book. Christmas Day, 1914. REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH My first memories are fragmentary and isolated and contemporaneous, as though one remembered vaguely some early day of the Seven Days. It seems as if time had not yet been created, for all are connected with emotion and place and without sequence. I remember sitting upon somebody's knee, looking out of a window at a wall covered with cracked and falling plaster, but what wall I do not remember, and being told that some relation once lived there. I am looking out of another window in London. It is at Fitzroy Road. Some boys are playing in the road and among them a boy in uniform, a telegraph boy perhaps. When I ask who the boy is, a servant tells me that he is going to blow the town up, and I go to sleep in terror.