FOUR YEARS

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.




FOUR YEARS 1887-1891.

At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and
sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in
Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantlepieces
copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony,
and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years
before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously
picturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, had
been anew enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last
affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place
of enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were
said to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, though
that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I
remember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores,
with their little seventeenth century panes, were so like any
common shop; and because the public house, called 'The Tabard'
after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public house; and
because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre-
Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The
big red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed,
when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge
of the roof, where nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember