I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour sulting some necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the catalogue; ao save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was piling, for a series of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy stories and, for an Ameri publisher, a two volume sele from the Irish s that would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book e more than three months reading; and I aid for the first some twelve pounds, (O Mr. E... said publisher to editor, you must never again pay so much) and for the sed, twenty; but I did not think myself badly paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes.
Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was pelled to live out of Ireland the greater part of every year and was but keeping my mind upon what I knew must be the subject matter of my poetry. I believed that if Morris had set his stories amid the sery of his own Wales (for I knew him to be of Welsh extra and supposed wrongly that he had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had nailed his Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought, and had given perhaps to moderry a breadth and stability like that of a poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British Museum, private, half animal, half divine figures, all uhe Gre athletes aian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the middle of the crolause or sit above measuring it out unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an unpremeditated joyous energy, that her I nor any other man, racked by doubt and enquiry, achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem to men and women of ara or of Galway their very soul. In our study of that ruiomb, raised by a queen to her dead lover, and finished by the unpaid labour of great sculptors after her death from grief, or so runs the tale, we ot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and Praxiteles; and I wao create once more an art, where the artists handiwork would hide as uhose half anonymous chisels, or as we find it in some old Scots ballads or in some twelfth or thirteenth tury Arthurian romahat handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for modelling his own image upon PallasAthenas buckler; for I took great pleasure iain allusions to the singers life one finds in old romances and ballads, and thought his presehere all the more poignant because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer riding behind his Maunciple and his Pardoner. Wolfram von Esbach, singing his German Parsival, broke off some description of a famished city to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that when the minstrel knew not who his poet was he must needs make up a man: When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one voice: "A blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the most beautiful for ever." Elaborate modern psychology souistical, I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybodys emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an alers