nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine."
Yeats was proud to belong in both strains of his blood to the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority that had produced over several centuries in Catholic Ireland an astonishing list of men of genius and power in arts and politics. The Yeats line had been settled in Ireland since the seventeenth century; they began as merchants, but later generations were Trinity College scholars and Church of Ireland clergymen, Yeats 's great-grandfather having been rector of Drumcliff in County Sligo, where the poet would be buried at last under his own famous epitaph, "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!" His mother's family, comfortably fixed Pollexfens and Middletons, were shipowners and millers in and about Sligo, where remnant Yeatses also lived. The hills and lakes and fens about the busy West of Ireland seaside town, with Ben Bulben to the north and Knocknarea, topped by Queen Maeve's cairn, to the south of a tidal river, became Yeats 's spiritual home in childhood and remained so all his life.
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