pity and terror, by heroism and sacrifice, until the whole nature seems
fresh annealed into a finer strength.

The intimate nature of these letters makes it necessary to say something
about the writer.

Coningsby Dawson graduated with honours in history from Oxford in 1905,
and in the same year came to the United States with the intention of
taking a theological course at Union Seminary. After a year at the
Seminary he reached the conclusion that his true lifework lay in
literature, and he at once began to fit himself for his vocation. In the
meantime his family left England, and we had made our home in Taunton,
Massachusetts. Here, in a quiet house, amid lawns and leafy elms, he
gave himself with indefatigable ardour to the art of writing. He wrote
from seven to ten hours a day, producing many poems, short stories, and
three novels. Few writers have ever worked harder to attain literary
excellence, or have practised a more austere devotion to their art. I
often marvelled how a young man, fresh from a brilliant career at the
greatest of English Universities, could be content with a life that was
so widely separated from association with men and affairs. I wondered
still more at the patience with which he endured the rebuffs that always
await the beginner in literature, and the humility with which he was
willing to learn the hard lessons of his apprenticeship in literary
form. The secret lay, no doubt, in his secure sense of a vocation, and
his belief that good work could not fail in the end to justify itself.
But, not the less, these four years of obscure drudgery wore upon his
spirit, and hence some of the references in these letters to his days of
self-despising. The period of waiting came to an end at last with the
publication in 1913 of his _Garden Without Walls_, which attained
immediate success. When he speaks in these letters of his brief burst of