if I should have
done much with my life but for her firmness and her care. After a time,
though not very quickly, I recovered tolerable industry, though it has
only been of late years that I have found it possible to face an hour's
verse without a preliminary struggle and much putting off.

Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock and those above the
waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps walk there again,
are so deep in my affections that I dream about them at night; and yet the
woods at Coole, though they do not come into my dream are so much more
knitted to my thought, that when I am dead they will have, I am persuaded,
my longest visit. When we are dead, according to my belief, we live our
lives backward for a certain number of years, treading the paths that we
have trodden, growing young again, even childish again, till some attain
an innocence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human
intellect's crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first few
simple thoughts that now, grown complex, through their contact with other
thoughts, explain the world, came to me from beyond my own mind. I
practised meditations, and these, as I think, so affected my sleep that I
began to have dreams that differed from ordinary dreams in seeming to take
place amid brilliant light, and by their invariable coherence, and certain
half-dreams, if I can call them so, between sleep and waking. I have
noticed that such experiences come to me most often amid distraction, at
some time that seems of all times the least fitting, as though it were
necessary for the exterior mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was
during 1897 and 1898, when I was always just arriving from or just setting
out to some political meeting, that the first dreams came. I was crossing
a little stream near Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride
from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down
upon me. I said, "That is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he
surrenders his will to the will of God." I felt an extreme surprise for my
whole imagination was preoccupied with the pagan mythology of ancient
Ireland, I was marking in red ink upon a large map, every sacred mountain.
The next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying, "The love of
God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique,
no other can satisfy the same need in God."

Lady Gregory and I had h