Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/483

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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
403

mirror. Beauty is from the antithetical self, and a woman can scarce but hate it, for not only does it demand a painful daily service, but it calls for the denial or the dissolution of the self.

"How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul,
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole
Beyond hearing and seeing
Or Archimedes' guess
To raise into being
That loveliness?"


XLVIII

On the morning of the great procession, the greatest in living memory, the Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite members of Parliament huddled together like cows in a storm, walk behind our carriage, and I hear John Redmond say to one of his late enemies "I went up nearer the head of the Procession, but one of the Marshals said 'This is not your place Mr Redmond; your place is further back.' 'No' I said 'I will stay here.' 'In that case,' he said, 'I will lead you back.'" Later on I can see by the pushing and shouldering of a delegate for South Africa how important place and procedure is; and noticing that Maud Gonne is cheered everywhere and that the Irish Members march through street after street without welcome, I wonder if their enemies have not intended their humiliation.


We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John Dillon is making the first speech he has made before a popular Dublin audience since the death of Parnell; and I have several times to keep my London delegates from interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and as I watch him the abstract passion begins to rise within me, and I am almost overpowered by an instinct of cruelty; I long to cry out; "Had Zimri peace who slew his master?"


Is our foundation-stone still unlaid when the more important streets are decorated for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee?

I find Maud Gonne at her hotel talking to a young working-man who looks very melancholy. She had offered to speak at one of the