LETTERS OF MARY SIBYLLA HOLLAND SELECTED AND EDITED BY HER SON BERNARD HOLLAND SECOND EDITION LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 37 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 1898 As night the life-inclining stars best shows, CHAPMAN. PREFACE THIS selection from letters has been made in order to embody in a permanent form a memorial of a nature of rare distinction. No books have a charm more great, or more permanent value, than collections of letters written, with no thought but to please, convey affection, help or console, by persons gifted with sympathy, reason, and the seeing faculty, if-and this is essential-the writer has also the power of style, the inmost soul of expression. Mr. Walter Pater has spoken of "the impress of a personal quality, a profound expressiveness, what the French call 'intimité,' by which is meant some subtler sense of originality, the seal on a man's work of what is most inward and peculiar in his moods and manner of apprehension; it is what we call expression carried to its highest intensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet, essentially perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes work in the imaginative order really worth having at all." |