Where There is Nothing / Being Volume I of Plays for an Irish Theatre

THE SECRET ROSE. THE CELTIC TWILIGHT. POEMS. THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS. THE SHADOWY WATERS. IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL.
WHERE THERE IS NOTHING: BEING VOLUME ONE OF PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE: BY W. B. YEATS LONDON: A. H. BULLEN, 47, GREAT RUSSELL STREET, W.C. 1903
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
My dear Lady Gregory, I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your own.
When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little chapters of the first edition of The Celtic Twilight, and that is how I began to write in the Irish way.
Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. The old tales were still alive for me indeed, but with a new, strange, half unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass, until at last, when I had finished The Secret Rose, and was half-way through The Wind Among the Reeds, a wise woman in her trance told me that my inspiration was from the moon, and that I should always live close to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I had no need to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true countenance of country life.