The Middle Years Author:Katharine Tynan 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: CHAPTER IV W. B. YEATS: LETTERS The Yeats family left Dublin for London somewhere, I imagine, about the end of 1887 or the beginning of 1888. My correspond... more »ence with Willie was a very steady one from that onward to 1893, the year of my marriage. After that Bedford Park was not so far away from Ealing, so the correspondence more or less dropped and never again became regular, although it has been intermittent during the years since. A letter from 6, Berkley Road, Regent's Park Road, must be, I think, the first I received from the poet after the change. It is dated Wednesday, 27. The poet never, of course, dated his letters properly, with the result that my quotations are placed in a very haphazard way. " I feel more and more that we shall have a school of Irish poetry, founded on Irish myth and history. I have written a couple of ballads which will probably appear in the Gael. Did you like my Fionn article, or has it appeared F . . . London is just as dull and dirty as my memory of it. I do not like it one whit better. You will see by the heading of this letter that I am in lodgings by myself, our house being still in disorder. I like being by myself greatly. Solitude having no tongue in her head is never a bore. She never demands of us sympathies we have not. She never makes the near war on the distant. . . . " You see we are a divided family at present. Rose " (their devoted servant, who has been with them through all wanderings and vicissitudes) " is sullen and home-sick—this latter we are all a little, I think." A few words here about Rose are permissible, since she was so much associated with the fortunes of the Yeats family. She was for years the presiding domestic genius, the homely guardian angel of a family too highlyendowed with the gifts of the spirit to be...« less