The father of William Butler Yeats was a well-known artist, John Butler Yeats, R.H.A. The son, named for his paternal grandfather, was born at Sandymount, Dublin, June 15, 1865. His father’s family had been identified with the church; the grandfather of the poet was Rector of Tullylish Down. His mother’s father was a merchant and shipowner at Sligo. The boy passed much time with these grandparents in the old town by the sea. When he was of school age, he was living with his parents in London and went to the Godolphin School, Hammersmith. At fifteen he returned to Dublin, attending the Erasmus Smith School and living with his relatives at Sligo. Memories of these early days are interwoven with legends and fancies in _The Celtic Twilight_, and the novel of autobiographical trend, _John Sherman_, which appeared under the pseudonym of “Gauconagh.” Like his hero of this tale, Yeats was homesick in London and longed to return to the environment of Sligo (or Ballah), to the familiar streets, the rows of tumble-down cottages with thatched roofs, the wharves covered with grass and the walls of the garden where, it was said, the gardener used to see the ghost of the former owner in the form of a rabbit.[159] In his poems he recalled the waves dashing upon the cliffs, the island of Innisfree, and the distant hills at sunset. His father hoped he would become an artist and so continue the family profession; the youth studied art for a brief time but he was restless and unproductive. He preferred to browse in libraries, reading translations--or making them--from Gaelic tales and poems. Even more he liked to sit by the turf fires in old Connaught and listen to the folk tales of the peasantry. The first poem in his collection of 1906, is addressed “To Some I Have Talked With By the Fire.” Here he saw again, in reverie, the ghostly companions and heard the weird tales of the dark folk who lived in souls Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees. When he was nineteen his first poem, “The Island of Statues,” was published in the _Dublin University Review_. With other young men at the University he became interested in a Brahmin, who was in London; on their invitation he came to Dublin to teach his philosophy. This yearning towards the occult was natural for a temperament like that of Yeats. He recalled that they fed the Brahmin a plate of rice or an apple every day and listened to his expositions.