The Celtic twilight Author:William Butler Yeats Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A VISIONARY A Visionary. A Young man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and muc... more »h else. I questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily, however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds,1 seemed to me theThe very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of 1 I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the world. I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I used to be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged. We once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser. Twilight. Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. ' Do you see anything, X ?' I said. ' A shining, winged woman, covered by her long hair, is standing near the doorway,' he answered, or some such words. ' Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us, and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form ?' I said ; for I am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion of their speech. ' No,' he replied; 'for if it were the thoughts of a person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit. It is some one who is de...« less