Four Years by W.B.Yeats Fiction Fantasy Literary Fairy Tales Folk Tales Legends & Mythology

<p><strong>I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt when as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen</strong> I had played among the unfinished houses once leaving the marks of my two hands blacked by a fall among some paint upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these were real houses while my play had been among toy-houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in picture books. I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen my father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to read; & once in Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen 'Dante's Dream' in the gallery there -- a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic power and today not very pleasing to me -- and its color its people its romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. It was a perpetual bewilderment that my father who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter now painted portraits of the first comer children selling newspapers or a consumptive girl with a basket offish upon her head and that when moved perhaps by memory of his youth he chose some theme from poetic tradition he would soon weary and leave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit. . . .</p>