The Writings of Mrs. Humphry Ward (V. 3)

Seitenzahl:

60

Gewicht:

100 g

Erschienen bei:

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Kurzbeschreibung

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION It was in the summer of 1889, about six months after the publication of ' Robert Elsmere,' that the main figures and ideas of' David Grieve' rose dimly yet most arrestingly before me. We were at Borough Farm, and it was an evening ? to use the Wordsworthian phrase?of 'extraordinary splendour and beauty.' I had been wandering through the heather and the pine-woods. The country was drenched in sunset, ? white, towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common ; everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light, interweaving heaven and earth, and transfiguring all dear familiar things, the old farmhouse, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the bit of ragged garden, the cattle in the tumbledown farmyard, the cottage down the lane. After months of rest, the fount of mental energy, which had been exhausted in me the year before, had filled again, unconsciously. I was eager to be at work again, and full of vague projects. The summer had brought me endless letters and discussions connected with ' Robert Elsmere,' and had seen especially its extraordinary success in the United States, where some four hundred thousand copies, in those days before copyright, had been already circulated. The whole experience had been one to rouse in any writer a wave of grateful and responsive feeling; and on this summer evening I became conscious of a strong wish to write again, and, if possible, on a subject more hopeful, positive, and consoling than the subject of the earlier book. The sunset splendour in which we walked, ? the children and I, ? after the summer day, seemed to speak of completion, fulfilment, the ri...

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Mehr von:  Humphry Ward, Cambridge Scholars Publishing