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Page 3
Y-wis, my dere herte, I am nought wrooth,
Have here my trouthe and many another ooth;
Now speek to me, for it am I, Criseyde!
Book III., 1110-2.
And fare now wel, myn owene swete herte!
Book V., 1421.
--CHAUCER (_Troilus and Criseyde_).
THE TRAVELLER
TO
THE READER
The traveller who presents himself in this little book feels how
tedious a person he may prove to be. Most travellers, that he ever
heard of, were the happy possessors of audacity and rigour, a zeal for
facts, a zeal for Science, a vivid faith in powder and gold. Who,
then, will bear for a moment with an ignorant, pacific adventurer,
without even a gun?
He may, however, seem even more than bold in one thing, and that is in
describing regions where the wise and the imaginative and the immortal
have been before him. For that he never can be contrite enough. And
yet, in spite of the renown of these regions, he can present neither
map nor chart of them, latitude nor longitude: can affirm only that
their frontier stretches just this side of Dream; that they border
Impossibility; lie parallel with Peace.
But since it is his, and only his, journey and experiences, his wonder
and delight in these lands that he tells of--a mere microcosm, as it
were--he entreats forgiveness of all who love them and their people as
much as he loves them--scarce "on this side idolatry."
H.B.
I
_Oh, what land is the Land of Dream?_
--WILLIAM BLAKE.
I lived, then, in the great world once, in an old, roomy house beside
a little wood of larches, with an aunt of the name of Sophia. My
father and mother died a few days before my fourth birthday, so that I
can conjure up only fleeting glimpses of their faces by which to
remember what love was then lost to me. Both were youthful at death,
but my Aunt Sophia was ever elderly. She was keen, and just, seldom
less than kind; but a child was to her something of a little animal,
and it was nothing more. In consequence, well fed, warmly clad, and in
freedom, I grew up almost in solitude between my angels, hearkening
with how simple a curiosity to that everlasting warfare of persuasion
and compulsion, terror and delight.
Which of them it was that guided me, before even I could read, to the
little room dark with holly trees that had been of old my uncle's
library, I know not. Perhaps at the instant it chanced there had
fallen a breathless truce between them, and I being solitary, my own
instinct took me. But having once found that pictured haven, I had
found somewhat of content.
I think half my youthful days passed in that low, book-walled chamber.
The candles I burned through those long years of evening would deck
Alps' hugest fir; the dust I disturbed would very easily fill again
the measure that some day shall contain my own; and the small studious
thumbmarks that paced, as if my footprints, leaf by leaf of that long
journey, might be the history of life's experience in little,--from
clearer, to clear, to faint--how very faint at last!
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