The book which is here presented has had its share both of good and evil report; and it fell so far short of even its own simple purpose, that I should be the last to hold that it had been blamed unduly. I have no sort of intention of answering my critics; but I would wish to make plain what the book itself perhaps fails to make plain, namely, what my purpose in writing it was. The book grew rather than was made. It was, from the first, meant as a message to the weak rather than as a challenge to the strong. There is a theory of life, wielded like a cudgel by the hands of the merry and high-hearted, that the whole duty of man is to dash into the throng, to eat and drink, to love and wed, to laugh and fight. That is a fine temper; it is the mood of the sailor-comrades of Odysseus— “That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads.” Such a mood, if it be not cruel, or tyrannous, or brutal, or overbearing, is a generous and inspiriting thing. Joined, as I have seen it joined, with simplicity and unselfishness and utter tenderness, it is the finest spirit in the world—the spirit of the great and chivalrous knight of old days. But when this mood shows itself without the kindly and gracious knightly attributes, it is a vile and ugly thing, insolent, selfish, animal. The problem, then, which I tried to present in my book, was this: I imagined a temperament of a peaceful and gentle order, a temperament without robustness and _joie de vivre_, but with a sense of duty, a desire to help, an anxious wish not to shirk responsibility; and then I tried to depict such a character as being suddenly thrust into the shadow, set aside, as, by their misfortune or their fault, a very large number of persons are set aside, debarred from ambition, pushed into a backwater of life, made, by some failure of vitality, into an invalid (a word which conceals many of the saddest tragedies of the world)—and I set myself to reflect how a man, with such limitations, might yet lead a life that was wholesome and contented and helpful; and then, at the last, I thought of him as confronted with a prospect of one of the deepest and sweetest blessings of life, the hope of a noble love; and then again, the tyrannous weakness that had laid him low, swept that too out of his grasp, and bade him exchange death for life, darkness for the cheerful day. Who does not know of home after home where such things happen? of life after life, on which calamities fall, so that the best that the sufferer can do is _to gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost_? This book, _The House of Quiet_, was written for all whose life, by some stroke of God, seemed dashed into fragments, and who might feel so listless, so dismayed, that they could not summon up courage even to try and save something from the desolate wreck.