A FOREWORD
This is not an old book. It is recorded, indeed, that it made its first appearance some thirty years ago. Then, twenty years after, a few additional copies were printed. Now it is again venturing forth from the sylvan solitude of its dreams—and this time the world, that has learned, during the last half decade, of the marvelous genius of the author of A Crystal Age, is ready for it.
Some books are, in a sense, old before they are born. They bring nothing new with them; they reflect, more or less, the prevailing thought, or literary fashion, of the chronological period to which they belong; hence they achieve an immediate popularity. In those excellent volumes of literary criticism, for instance, Hazlitt's English Poets and The Spirit of the Age, we read much of the author's great contemporaries of a hundred years ago—Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and a score of others whose fame has
