I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that it was my business in life to bean artist and a poet, and that there could be no business parable to that. I refused to read books, and even to meet people who excited me to generalization, but all to no purpose. I said my prayers much as in childhood, though without the ularity of hour and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be rescued from abstra, and bee as pre?occupied with life as had been the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered tinual remorse, and only became tent when my abstras had posed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped to spoil my early piving it a of seality through my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I sidered impure. Even in practical life I only very gradually began to use generalizations, that have since bee the foundation of all I have done, or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know, all men may have been as timid; for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty tain all the truths we shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from opinions caught up in casual irritation or momentary phantasy. As life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us i, ive us victory, whether over ourselves or others, & it is these thoughts, tested by passion, that we call vis. Among subjective men (in all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so that fates antithesis; while what I have called The mask is aional antithesis to all that es out of their internal nature. We begin to live when we have ceived life as a tragedy.