There is little need for an editor’s help in following the story of the life which these letters portray. They are, in fact, an almost complete diary of that life, for the earliest bears date when the writer was a child at boarding-school, and the last was written only a few days before she died. Of the years that came between, the record is almost uninterrupted; so that the task confided to me resolves itself into little more than a statement of the few facts connected with the personal and family history of their author, that naturally have no place in the letters themselves. No doubt we have gained much, so far as the material convenience of the great public life is concerned, from the inventions that, for all practical purposes, have reduced time and space to comparative insignificance. We have, however, lost some good things, which those who lived in younger days must always regret, and for which there is small compensation in the material gain we have received in exchange. Among these losses, that of letter-writing is perhaps the most serious. A whole world of innocent enjoyment for contemporaries and for posterity has been blotted out, and, so far as appears, nothing is taking its place. Is it the newspapers? But how scattered, how disjointed, how impersonal, the record they contain! We might as well hope to recall the charm of some old garden loved in youth, by turning over the leaves of a _herbarium_ in which its flowers had been pressed, as to make the domestic life of a time gone by, live again in reading the files of a newspaper. Nor do memoirs or biographies give us what we want. They are too formal, too self-conscious; they want the spontaneity, the vividness of impression, the lightness of the recording hand. These things letters give us, and letters alone. Science has many fairy-tales to tell us, but the most magical of all her inventions is that toy, the phonograph, invented by our own Edison. It listens to the words that are whispered in its ear, to the songs that are sung to it, to the gossip that buzzes about it, and the record made on its revolving surface, replaced at any time upon the cylinder—after the lapse of an hour, or of a hundred years—will repeat what has been confided to it in the very voice of the speaker, with every tone and every inflection as clear as when first it spoke. Familiar letters are privileged to play the same magical part. To the readers of successive generations, they speak with the living voice of the writer; they recall the fugitive emotions, the joys, the sorrows, the whims, the passions, and as we read we persuade ourselves that we are part and parcel of the times they record.