A fairy promise with a mortal price
Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide
The source is Yeats's verse play The Land of Heart's Desire, first published in 1894. Chesterton changes the first line: the early Stone & Kimball witness transcribed on Wikisource reads ‘Run on the top of the dishevelled tide’. The mountain line follows unchanged. The language occurs both in Maire Bruin's wish to escape domestic life and in the fairy child's subsequent offer to her. Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire, speeches beginning ‘Come, faeries’ and ‘You love that great tall fellow’.
The invitation is spoken within a drama, not offered as a freestanding statement of Yeats's doctrine. Its costs and conditions matter to the challenge Chesterton makes in the following paragraph.
A later Poems witness also preserves ‘Run on the top’; its June 1912 preface explicitly describes revisions to the play. It corroborates the wording but cannot by itself establish what Chesterton could have read before Orthodoxy appeared in 1908. Its publication notice independently dates the separate play to 1894. Yeats, Poems, publication notice and 1912 preface.
Sources
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