I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days reading it in railway trains or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics-which are in the original full of subtlety of rhythm of untranslatable delicacies of colour of metrical invention-display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long. The work of a supreme culture they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition where poetry and religion are the same thing has passed through the centuries gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. -W. B. Yeats