I had various women friends on whom I would call towards five oclock, mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could n to a man without meeting some peting thought, but partly because their tea & toast saved my pennies for the bus ride home; but with women, apart from their intimate exges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons, when a couple of girls sat near and begaig my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Sihen I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetorid from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only uood vaguely and occasionally that I must, for my special purpose, use nothing but the on syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written that first lih its ventional archaism??Arise and go??nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it was Gothic,??It is not very good, Morris had said, but it is better than any thing else they have got and so they hate it.??I grew suddenly oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, There are miles and miles of stone and brick all round me, and presently added, If John the Baptist, or his like, were to e again and had his mi upon it, he could make all these peoplego out into some wilderness leaving their buildiy, and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now, so enlightehe day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a few days at Oxford copying out a seveh tury translation of Poggios Liber Facetiarum or the Hypo?machia of Poliphili for a publisher; I fet which, for I copied both; aurned very pale to my troubled family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need er. I was allanning some great gesture, putting the whole world into one scale of the baland my soul into the other, and imagining that the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty years have passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave the metropolis without some like stimulant; and all, after two or three, or twelve or fifteen years, acc to obstinacy, have uood that we achieve, if we do achieve, in little diligeary stitches as though we were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most haughty mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in some far plader the opy ... i the city of kites and crows.
In London I saw nothing good,