00.01 - INTRODUCTION

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

It is not good that a book should be alone: this is a companion volume to _A Bunch of Everlastings_. ’O God,’ cried Caliban from the abyss, O God, if you wish for our love, Fling us _a handful of stars_! The Height evidently accepted the challenge of the Depth. Heaven hungered for the love of Earth, and so the stars were thrown. I have gathered up a few, and, like children with their beads and berries, have threaded them upon this string. It will be seen that they do not all belong to the same constellation. Most of them shed their luster over the stern realities of life: a few glittered in the firmament of fiction. It matters little. A great romance is a portrait of humanity, painted by a master-hand. When the novelist employs the majestic words of revelation to transfigure the lives of his characters, he does so because, in actual experience, he finds those selfsame words indelibly engraven upon the souls of men. And, after all, _Sydney Carton’s Text_is really _Charles Dickens’ Text_; _Robinson Crusoe’s Text_ is _Daniel Defoe’s Text_; the text that stands embedded in the pathos of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is the text that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had enthroned within her heart. Moreover, to whatever group these splendid orbs belong, their deathless radiance has been derived, in every case, from the perennial Fountain of all Beauty and Brightness.

Frank W. Boreham.

Armadale, Melbourne, Australia.