My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I
     planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called
     Innisfree....

     I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination
     of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived,
     seeking wisdom.

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the spacious and twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats’s verse.  Here were those fishermen and raths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeat themselves as images through his work.  Here, too, he had relatives eccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the

    Merchant skipper that leaped overboard
    After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.

Mr. Yeats’s relations seem in his autobiography as real as the characters in fiction.  Each of them is magnificently stamped with romance or comedy—­the hypochondriac uncle, for example, who—­

passed from winter to summer through a series of woollens that had always to be weighed; for in April or May, or whatever the date was, he had to be sure that he carried the exact number of ounces he had carried upon that date since boyhood.

For a time Mr. Yeats thought of following his father’s example and becoming a painter.  It was while attending an art school in Dublin that he first met A.E.  He gives us a curious description of A.E. as he was then:—­

He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and already he spoke to us of his visions.  His conversation, so lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and again some phrase could be understood and repeated.  One day he announced that he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was weak, and the arts or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken it further.

Mr. Yeats’s memoirs, however, are not confined to prose.  His volume of verse called Responsibilities is almost equally autobiographical.  Much of it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries—­quarrels about Synge, about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things.  He aims barbed epigrams at his adversaries.  Very Yeatsian is an epigram “to a poet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and mine":—­

    You say, as I have often given tongue
    In praise of what another’s said or sung,
    ’Twere politic to do the like by these;
    But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?

In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:—­

    But where’s the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

There is a noble arrogance again in the lines called A Coat:—­