BY HAVELOCK ELLIS = "En portant à leur plus haut degré ses sentiments les plus LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET COVENT GARDEN 1890 { 5-15-39 gt-wenly sib 5-13-39 PREFACE. FROM our earliest days we look out into the world with wide-eyed amazement, trying to discover for ourselves what it is like. Instinctively we must spend a great part of our lives in searching and probing into the nature and drift. of the things among which, by a volition not our own, we were projected. To-day, when we stand, as it were, at the beginning of a new era, and when we have been celebrating the centenary of the most significant event in modern history, an individual who, for his own guidance, has done his part in this searching and probing, may perhaps be allowed to present some of the results, not claiming to be an expert, not desiring to impose on others any private scheme of the universe. The pulse of life runs strong and fast; I have tried to bring a sensitive lever to that pulse here and there, to determine and record, as delicately as I could, its rhythms: the papers I now present might be called a bundle of sphygmographic tracings. A large part of one's investigations into the spirit of one's time must be made through the medium of literary personalities. I have se |