Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition, David Price,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BY
THOMAS WOOLNER, R.A.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE.
1887.
“A ray has pierced me from the highest heaven—
I have believed in worth; and do believe.”
So runs Mr. Woolner’s song, as it proceeds to show the issueof a noble earthly love, one with the heavenly. Its issue is thelife of high endeavour, wherein
“They who would be somethingmore
Than they who feast, and laugh and die, will hear
The voice of Duty, as the note of war,
Nerving their spirits to great enterprise,
And knitting every sinew for the charge.”
This Library is based on a belief in worth, and p. 6ona knowledge of the wide desire among men now to read books that arebooks, which “do,” as Milton says, “contain a potencyof life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are;nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extractionof that living intellect that bred them.” When, therefore,as now happens for the second time, a man of genius who has writtenwith a hope to lift the hearts and minds of men by adding one more truebook to the treasures of the land, honours us by such recognition ofour aim, and fellow-feeling with it, that he gives up a part of hisexclusive right to his own work, and offers to make it freely currentwith the other volumes of our series,—we take the gift, if wemay dare to say so, in the spirit of the giver, and are the p. 7happierfor such evidence that we are not working in vain.
Such evidence comes in other forms: as in letters from remote readersin lonely settlements, from the far West, from sheep-farms in Australia,from farthest India, from places to which these little volumes maketheir way as pioneers; being almost the first real books that have therebeen seen. To send a true voice over, for delight and supportof earnest workers who open their hearts wide to a good book in a waythat we can hardly understand,—we who live wastefully in the midstof plenty, and are apt sometimes to leave to feed on the fair mountainand batten on the moor,—is worth the while of any man of geniuswho puts his soul into his work, as Mr. Woolner does.
p. 8Booksin the “National Library” that come like those of Mr. Patmoreand Mr. Woolner are here as friends and companions. If they werenot esteemed highly they would not be here. Beyond that impliedopinion there is nothing to be said. He would be an ill-bred hostwho criticised his guest, or spoke loud praise of him before his face. Nor does a well-known man of our own day need personal introduction. It is only said, in consideration that this book will be read by manywho cannot know what is known to those who have access to the worksof artists, that Mr. Thomas Woolner is a Royal Academician, and oneof the foremost sculptors of our day. For a couple of years, from1877 to 1879, he was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy. A colossal p. 9statueby him in bronze of Captain Cook was designed for a site overlookingSydney Harbour. A poet’s mind has given life to his workon the marble, and when he was an associate with Mr. Millais, Mr. HolmanHunt, and others, who, in 1850, were endeavouring to bring truth andbeauty of expression into art,