The Celtic Twilight by W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
page 58 of 123 (47%)
page 58 of 123 (47%)
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vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway
out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but Foreshadowings mingled with the images Of man's misdeeds in greater days than these, as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good spirits. 1902 MIRACULOUS CREATURES |
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