strength, new ambition, new Hope, new Life, new Love! Look Eastward!
Aye, look Eastward!”
His last words were still ringing in my ears as I entered my room, and
undrew the window-curtains, just in time to see the sun burst in glory
from his ocean-prison, and clothe the world in the light of a new day.
“So may it be for him, and me, and all of us!” I mused. “All that is
evil, and dead, and hopeless, fading with the Night that is past!
All that is good, and living, and hopeful, rising with the dawn of Day!
“Fading, with the Night, the chilly mists, and the noxious vapours,
and the heavy shadows, and the wailing gusts, and the owl’s melancholy
hootings: rising, with the Day, the darting shafts of light,
and the wholesome morning breeze, and the warmth of a dawning life,
and the mad music of the lark! Look Eastward!
“Fading, with the Night, the clouds of ignorance, and the deadly blight
of sin, and the silent tears of sorrow: and ever rising, higher,
higher, with the Day, the radiant dawn of knowledge, and the sweet
breath of purity, and the throb of a world’s ecstasy! Look Eastward!
[Image…’Look eastward!’]
“Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered
leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets
thatnumb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling
upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will,
and the heavenward gaze of faith–the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen!
“Look Eastward! Aye, look Eastward!”
End of Project Gutenberg’s Etext of Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carrol
PREFACE.
One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, at p. 77, was drawn
by ‘Miss Alice Havers.’ I did not state this on the title-page, since
it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful
pictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, at pp. 386, 387, of Sunday as spent by children of
the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a
child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed ‘Fairy Sylvie’ and ‘Bruno’s Revenge,’ are a reprint,
with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote
in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty,
for ‘Aunt Judy’s Magazine,’ which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making
it the nucleus of a longer story. As the years went on, I jotted down,
at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue,
that occurred to me–who knows how?–with a transitory suddenness that
left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon
them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these
random flashes of thought–as being suggested by the book one was reading,
or struck out from the ‘flint’ of one’s own mind by the ‘steel’ of a
friend’s chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring,
a propos of nothing–specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon,
‘an effect without a cause.’ Such, for example, was the last line of
‘The Hunting of the Snark,’ which came into my head (as I have already
related in ‘The Theatre’ for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary
walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams,
and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever.
There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book–
one, my Lady’s remark, ‘it often runs in families, just as a love for
pastry does’, at p. 88; the other, Eric Lindon’s badinage about having
been in domestic service, at p. 332.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a
huge unwieldy mass of litterature–if the reader will kindly excuse the
spelling–which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a
consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write.
Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far