PREFACE

I give to the world this message from the great departed writer, George Eliot.

I have no apology to offer as to the manner in which it comes; I have no explanation to make in regard to a power of which, though personally I have been always more or less cognizant, any language by which I might seek to make myself understood would to the majority be as unintelligible and as unmeaning as Choctaw.

Spirituality has hitherto been an abortion, an animal or a phantom, with the brain- of an idiot, but the mighty hunger needs of the world have been incessantly developing this brain, until the time is coming, and is now at the door, when it will speak from the intellect, not the low, guttural beast muttering, fear-choked utterance; not the high-pitched, squeaking, ghostly, far-away gibberish, which you have heard as its predominating notes, but the voice of its own soul and mind replying clearly, reasonably, consistently to your own eternal questionings; then you will "awake, and remember and understand."

As for our writer, she was the dissector of human motives, and in that department the kindest, yet keenest, most unflinching surgeon that ever handled a knife. She cut to the bone, and through it if necessary; apparently because she must, and from pure love of her art. Her work is not ended; hardly interrupted: she was at school here; she has graduated with highest honors, and will practice hereafter in the universal hospital of diseased and suffering humanity.

Her field is enlarged somewhat commensurate with the power of her soul, which far surpasses any idea hitherto entertained of her, even by those who admired her most and loved her best. As an artiste she is even ideally perfect; her constructive power is beyond, far beyond, that of any intelligence which ever came within the range of my consciousness. Nothing escapes her; the fragments thrown away and rejected of men, are by her carefully treasured and fashioned into things of immortal beauty.

As she awakens into the wide freedom of her new existence, not one brain alone, but many, will be needed to transmit the perfect, rounded ripeness of her thought. And many a sensitive struggling now with an unshapen, unclad idea, bearing its burden about with him, while a poverty-stricken world waits for its utterance, will by her wondrous influence awake to find it hewn and shapen into letters of living light—all the meaning of its mute marble carved into fairest proportions of grace and symmetry.

Blessings on her evermore, for daring to unveil the truth that was in her, without mutilation, without accompanying nauseous covering of tradition, and commonplace, conventional falsehood!

O world, you have a reputation, a richly deserved one, for burning and scourging, and starving and freezing your truth-tellers while living, and laying them with fulsome praises in your Westminster Abbeys when dead; but she wrapped her mist-grey fiction cloak about her, and heeded you not; living or dying she heeded you not; and she heeds you not, now.

AMARANTH
Philad'a, Pa., 7th December, 1881.