Note that “The Four Winds of Desire” was omitted from the 1902 edition but given as an appendix in Kathleen Raine, ed., The Celtic Twilight (1981) - for which inclusion, see her explanation in RICORSO Library, “Criticism - Major Authors” > Raine [attached].  Note also that “The Four Winds of Desire” is erroneously listed as being included in both the 1893 and 1902 editions of the work in Robert Welch, ed., Writings on Irish Folklore [... &c.] by W. B. Yeats (Penguin 1993), [Appendix,] pp.456-58 (i.e., included in the listing for 1902 edition also where, in effect, it is replaced by “By the Roadside” for reasons that Raine explains.)

1. “The host is riding from Knocknarea ...” (otherwise “The Hosting of the Sidhe”), is printed without a title in the 1893 edition but appears as “The Host” in four-line stanzas - with some variant lines in the third (chiefly the omission of possessive adjectives) - in the 1902 edition. It is the 1983 version of the poem that Kathleen Raine reproduces under the title “The Host” in her edition (The Celtic Twilight, Colin Smythe 1981). Here, in place of the lines ‘Empty your heart of its mortal dream ... &c.’ to be found in the second edition, we meet the stanza:

‘And brood no more where the fire is bright,
Filling thy heart with a mortal dream;
For breasts are heaving and eyes a-gleam:
‘Away, come away, to the dim twilight.

‘Arms are waving, lips are apart,
... [&c.]

In that later version, the refrain ‘Away, come away, to the dim twilight’ is no longer used while the phrase ‘And brood no more ...’ - better know from Ailil’s song in The Countess Cathleen, and taken from thence by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses - has been expunged also - presumably on account of its use in a new context.
2. Thomas of Ercildoune may be identified as Thomas Learmouth, or Thomas the Rhymer, from the town of Ercildoune (pronounced Earlston), in Berwickshire, Scotland, who lived in the 13th century and who was supposed to possess a gift of prophecy that served to bolster the cause of Scottish independence in that period. He is believed to have foretold the death of Alexander III of Scotland.
3. This sentence is actually missing from the 1893 edition of The Celtic Twilight which provided the copytext of the Gerrards Cross edition [as stated Note 1, supra]. The allusion to the ‘wind among the reeds’ in this passage - i.e.,

‘They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds,  seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen.’ [My italics.]

—is in the nature of a retrospective addition, connecting the stories in the revised version with the contemporary collection of that name (The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899).
 4. Yeats supplies the following note to “Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye” in the 1924 edition [presumably copied from the 1902 Edn.]: ‘Ballylee Castle, or Thoor [sic] Ballylee, as I have named it to escape from the too magnificent word ‘castle’, is now my propertly and I spend my summers or some part of them there.’
5. There is some confusion about the last sentence in this story since it is absent from 1893 version reprinted in in Welch, ed., Writings on Irish Folklore [... by] W. B. Yeats (1993). It is likewise absent from the edition in the The Secret Rose (Macmillan 1959) - a compilation volume - whose version is clearly based on the 1902 edition in spite of the given date of 1893. Finally, it is absent from the 1981 version edited and introduced by Kathleen Raine for Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross). That version is asserted in her introduction to be based on the best of the 1893 and 1902 editions though, in reality, is comprehensively republishes the 1902 text and notes with the addition of “The Four Winds of Desire” (which she has chosen to reinstate although Yeats excised it in 1902). The sentence is, however, present in the digital edition hosted by Sacred Books [online] which is expressly said to be based on the 1902 edition and can be taken to have first appeared there at that time. It follows that Raine purposely excised the sentence as not answering to her criterion of "best edition". It is conspicuous, also that she includes some new footnotes from the 1924 edition, being the Earlier Poems (1924). N.B: I have had sight of the 1893 edition but have not had sight of the 1902 edition at the time of writing.
6. The 1893 text appears to end, ‘And that’s why my brother emigrated.’ (See The Secret Rose, Macmillan 1959, p.99.) Yeats unquestionably added paragraphs and sentences to the revised volume - as for instance - perhaps most conspicuously - the final paragraph of three in “A Teller of Tales”, in which he describes the comical fate of his informant Paddy Flynn who is apparently finished off by a ‘large bottle of whiskey’ which a friend of the author gave him, doubtless in good faith.
 The lack of proper remorse on the author’s part may be read in a spirit of literary fun which surrounds these chiefly narrations for all their being said to be based on real encounters with the story-tellers and therefore conveying some sense of their private lives. Indeed, Yeats goes to the length of informing us that he has changed some details on the preface of the 2nd edition in order to protect his informants from suspicion on the part of their neighbours of communicating with devils - a solicitude which doesn’t seem to extend to the alcoholic casualty of the present story. Does this mean, in fact, that the stories are, on the whole, fictional creations only loosely based on originals heard in conversation with his supposed informants?

Editorial Remarks
The present text derives from the 1902 edition of The Celtic Twilight available at the Gutenberg Project [online] supplemented by page-numbers given in the edition hosted on the Sacred Books website [online], which explicitly claims to be the source of the other. That truth of that claim is fairly evident from the fact that both editions share several scanning errors - as, for instance, the phrase ‘an happened’ for ‘all happened’ in the story“Dreams that Have No Moral”. The Gutenberg edition is said to have been released in 2003 on that page. The Sacred Text edition was created in 2001 and revised in 2004 to include page numbers in the margin which are said to have been from ‘an original copy of the 1902 edition’. A further revision conducted by in 2009 exclusively concerned the format of presentation. All of these stages of revision are duly attested by the editors. [See further remarks on specific editing issues, infra.]
 The Celtic Twilight can also be read in a number of popular editions including the one introduced issued by Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross) in 1981, with an introduction by Kathleen Raine. That edition combines the texts of 1983 and 1902 in such a way as to retain the best of both in the opinion of that writer. In practice this means that “The Four Winds of Desire”, the concluding prose piece of the 1893 edition which Yeats excluded from the ensuing edition of 1902, has here been printed as ‘appendix’ - though there was no such appendix in either the 1893 or the 1902 editions.
 Because the 1902 edition has subtantially be taken as the copy-text, Yeats’s own additions to the Preface of that edition, together with several sentences added and alterations made to others within individual stories have also been reproduced here. Finally, the footnotes which first appeared in the 1902 edition have been carried over also. Kathleen Raine states her reasons for including "The Four Winds of Desire" in her introdction to the 1981 edition, which is reset with pagination and a lay-out unrelated to either of the previous properly Yeatsian editions. (Nor is his title page reproduced or the frontispiece by John Butler Yeats.) Her index of the contents is presented as attached.
  The individual stories can also be found in Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth by W. B. Yeats, ed. Robert Welch (London: Penguin 1993), where they are distributed according to the dates of their earliest publication. (A few of those published in the 1893 edition were published previously, and some of those added to the 1902 edition were first printed in the interim.)
 Professor Welch’s volume contains much interesting material on folklore which Yeats scattered in essays and reviews between 1888 and 1933. His introduction to Yeats’s engagement with, and treatment of, Irish supernatural traditions is highly recommended on this module, while his volume also includes an Appendix listing the contents of the 1893 and 1902 imprints for ready comparison. (This unfortunately appears to be in error about the inclusion of “The Four Winds of Desire” in the 1902 edition - a story that Yeats added as a discursive appendix to the 1893 edition but deleted from the volume published in 1902, where so much other material is added.

Editing Issues
In revising the present digital text for screen, I have kept The Secret Rose and Other Stories (1959) to hand for guidance. This is a compilation containing The Celtic Twilight and The Secret Rose, along with Stories of Red Hanrahan, each published separate by Yeats but here printed together - being a ‘selection from Mythologies’, itself a larger compilation of Yeats’s prose fiction published by the same house in the same year. (Both of these were issued in the same year in London and Dublin - the latter under the Gill & Macmillan imprint, being the edition I have actually used.)
 Page numbers given in square brackets in the Table of Contents at the head of the first file [as attached] derive from the digital edition at Sacred Text website which corresponds to a copy of the 1902 edition taken by those editors as their copytext, as the explicitly assert. In common with all editions (including the Macmillan), I have used double-inverted commas only for speeches-within-speeches, contrary to the usual method in current fiction texts and the great mass of internet transcriptions of the same. In fact, RICORSO generally adheres to single-within-double as the method of treating diacritical for speeches and quotations except where the source document renders this impractical.
 More significantly, I have eliminated the inter-paragraph spaces used in both the Sacred Text and Gutenberg editions in order to approximate more closely to original printed format. For the same reason, I have introduced a space at the beginning of each paragraph - be it narrative or dialogue - as in any printed book. Why this is not done more often by web-editors, I am not sure, since it bears no relation to the problem of adding page-references in their proper place alongside the flowing text - a problem which requires the use of tables or frames for its solution. (The increasing use of inter-paragraph spacing in book-bound publications, albeit by setting up 2 or even 4 points in the “after” box of the Paragraph Format Menu in a MS Word or Aldus Page-maker - is clearly the child of electronic publishing rather than conventional printed book design.

Of OCRs and all that ...
Of scanners and their progeny in the line of botched and otherwise devilled texts, it is hardly possible to complain enough. My favourite recurrent blip - and a dependable sign of scanners-at-work - is the substitution of the word modem for modern where careful editing has not followed on the more mechanical tasks of word-processing and spell-check. This is so recurrent that I routinely search for for "modem in every digital text I handle. Modem, my hat! - though I suppose if might be said that modem is in fact a very fair synonym for modern in the online word.
 The trouble with all this - the real and solution-resisting trouble - is that time spent on digital editing is time lost to scholarship. It does not console me to think that the majority of digitising is probably done in long sheds in Indochina (if such a place still exists) rather than in the Longroom of Trinity College Library - though I would not be surprised if there were as many scanner at work amid the dusty tomes held there as are to be found in Yale or Harvard.
 Perhaps the medieval scriptoria weren’t really all that different ... And what could St. Columcille have achieved with a computer and an internet connection? And would the perigrini have stayed at home instead of wandering the wide world to establish their arts in Bobbio and Köln?

BS

Digital versions of The Celtic Twilight (1902) can be reached on internet on the Sacred Texts website or Gutenberg or Hermetic.com -