With Lady Gregory at Coole

Abstract

A couple of weeks after my vision,¹ Lady Gregory, whom I had met once in London for a few minutes, drove over to Tulira, and after Symons’s return to London I stayed at her house. When I saw her great woods on the edge of a lake, I remembered the saying about avoiding woods and living near the water. Had this new friend come because of my invocation, or had the saying been but prevision and my invocation no act of will, but prevision also? Were those unintelligible words—‘avoid woods because they concentrate the solar ray’—but a dream-confusion, an attempt to explain symbolically an actual juxtaposition of wood and water? I could not say nor can I now. I was in poor health, the strain of youth had been greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men, who must always, I think, find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides, as I had done periodically for years, upon Hodos Chameliontos. The first time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth year, when I tried to create a more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there through a novel² that I could neither write nor cease to write which had Hodos Chameliontos for its theme.

Extracted from The Trembling of the Veil (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1922).