To compare small things with great, it was an attempt to depict, in modern unromantic fashion, such a situation as that of _Robinson Crusoe_, where a man is thrown suddenly upon his own resources, shut off from sympathy and hope. In that great fiction one sees the patience, the courage, the inventiveness of the simple hero grow under the author’s hand; but the soul of my own poor hero had indeed suffered shipwreck, though he fell among less stimulating surroundings than the caverns and freshets, the wildfowl and the savages, of that green isle in the Caribbean Sea. In the _Life_ of William Morris, a man whose chosen motto was _si je puis_, and who, whatever else he was accused of, was never accused of a want of virile strength, there is an interesting and pathetic letter, which he wrote at the age of fifty-one, when he was being thrust, against his better judgment, into a prominent position in the Socialist movement. “My habits are quiet and studious,” he said, “and, if I am too much worried with ‘politics,’ _i.e._, intrigue, I shall be no use to the cause as a writer. All this shows, you will say, a weak man: that is true, but I must be taken as I am, not as I am not.” This sentence sums up, very courageously and faithfully, the difficulty in which many people, who believe in ideas, and perceive more clearly than they are able to act, are placed by honest diffidence and candid self-knowledge. We would amend life, if we could; but the impossibility lies, not in seeing what is beautiful and just and right, but in making other people desire it. It is conceivable, after all, that God knows best, and has good reasons for delay—though many men, and those not the least gallant, act as though they knew better still. But it matters very little whether we betray our own weakness, by what we say or do. What does matter is that we should have desired something ahead of us, should have pointed it out to others. We may not attain it; others may not attain it; but we have shown that we dare not acquiesce in our weakness, that we will not allow ourselves to be silent about our purer hopes, that we will not recline in a false security, that we will not try to solve the problem by overlooking its difficulties; but that we will strive to hold fast, in a tender serenity, to a belief in the strong and loving purpose of God, however dark may be the shadow that lies across the path, however sombre the mountain-barrier that lies between us and the sunlit plain. A. C. B. _April 12, 1907._ PREFATORY NOTE TO ORIGINAL EDITION