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INTRODUCTION.
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slope of a mountain, compassed about by a high wall, while he himself was shivering outside in the cold and darkness. He strove to go to the mountain, and after long search found a little gap in the wall, through which with infinite difficulty he struggled. " Then," he says, " I was exceeding glad, and went and sat down in the midst of them, and so was com- forted by the light and heat of their Sun." This instinctive turning toward the bright and joyous, the mark of a whole- some nature, is present everywhere in Bunyan. The Pil- grim's Progress is drenched, even in the gloomy passages, with an atmosphere of bright courage, of abiding cheerful- ness and inner peace, which often contrasts oddly with the lugubrious situation. Especially the second part, written after Bunyan's material troubles were over, has shed over it a mellow light of joy, almost of gaiety, which reminds us of Bach's music, itself an outgrowth, though in a different age and under different conditions, of the same strenuous spirit of Protestantism. Certainly there is to be found nowhere in literature a more golden radiance than suffuses the closing pages of the great allegory, when the Pilgrims have crossed the river of Death, and climb the slope of Immanuel Land toward the shining towers of the Celestial City.

THE TEXT.

The Pilgrim's Progress has suffered much at the hands of successive generations of editors, who have, by altering outgrown idioms and smoothing down roughnesses of dic- tion, taken away the crispness and vigor from many a quaint old phrase. This process was begun by Bunyan himself, in the second edition, and has gone on until now the num- ber of variations from the original text shown by ordinary popular editions is surprisingly large. The present editor has thought it worth while, therefore, to give the allegory exactly as it came in the first instance from Bunyan's hand. The text here given follows the careful facsimile