me revise his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to clarify
some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude to certain quotations
from foreign writers. Hence this English translation of my _Sentimiento
Trágico_ presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that
of the original Spanish. This perhaps compensates for what it may lose
in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is
scarcely translatable.

It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in opening up to me a
public of English-speaking readers, should some day lead to my writing
something addressed to and concerned with this public. For just as a new
friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself,
as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which,
if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is
with a new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish
spirit--my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish--unexplored by
myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to
cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples
of English speech.

And now, no more.

God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which
I desire for myself.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.

SALAMANCA,
_April, 1921._