These passages in his autobiography are specially interesting as evidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vague day-dreamer among poets.  The truth is, Mr. Yeats’s early poems show that he was a boy of eager curiosity and observation—­a boy with a remarkable intellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build a new altar to beauty.  He has never been entirely aloof from the common world.  Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man of letters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human interests to a far greater extent than most people realize.  He has nearly always been a politician and always a fighter.

At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to discover why people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him.

Reveries Over Childhood and Youth is the autobiography of one who was always more self-conscious than his fellows.  Mr. Yeats describes himself as a youth in Dublin:—­

sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet, and stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a loose sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the wind like Byron’s tie in the picture.

Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have been regarded as self-conscious attitudinizing by his neighbours—­especially by the “stupid stout woman” who lived in the villa next to his father’s, and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:—­

I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw the stout woman and her family standing at the window.  I have a way of acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what I am doing.  Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down over the back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss.

It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself as he is to Mr. George Moore.  If he were not he would not have troubled to write his autobiography.  And that would have been a loss to literature. Reveries Over Childhood and Youth is a book of extraordinary freshness.  It does not, like Wordsworth’s Prelude, set forth the full account of the great influences that shaped a poet’s career.  But it is a delightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet in his boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose.

Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was more important than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned from London.  He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in his youth writing plays and poems in imitation of Shelley and Spenser.  Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than the masterpieces of English literature.

It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes, that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such originality of charm in The Lake Isle of Innisfree:—­