PREFACE WRITTEN FOR THIS EDITION BY LADY 



GREGORY 



A few Sundays ago I was staying with Mr. Blunt at Newbuildings 

 Place, that ancient and beautiful manor house which has been a 

 best loved part of his inheritance, as I have been used to do perhaps 

 once in a year when chance or business draws me from Ireland to 

 London. We were out of doors all the morning, he in his pony 

 chair, in the beautiful oak woods that cover some five hundred of his 

 Sussex acres. Our midday meal was set out nearer the house yet 

 still under blossoming trees. Peacocks came to be fed and among 

 them a Spanish lamb, black-spotted, using its sprouting horns to 

 butt at the watch dog in whose companionship it had been reared. 

 And as we talked "the Squire," (for so he is known to his people) 

 told me, and with pleasure in the telling, that these volumes of his 

 "Diaries," being sold out in England were now being printed in 

 America, an honour new to him, for his work is not yet so widely 

 known there as at home. But he said, and he was a little troubled 

 with regard to this, that a new preface had been asked of him that 

 would give something more of a biography, even of a confession, 

 than is to be found in the text of the "Diaries" and "I am not at 

 present" he said "in a mood for writing this." I did not see him 

 again, but after my return to Ireland not many days later, a home- 

 coming hastened by news of troublesome events near by, a letter 

 came from him reminding me of our talk and asking me to "do him 

 a great kindness" and myself write the few needed words. I felt 

 such a request from my friend of forty years an honour and not to 

 be refused if I could but accomplish it, but there is much to say in 

 a short space and it is sometimes harder to say less than more. 



" I have lived my life in full " he said the other dav and he had 

 written, as I remembered, in the preface to the complete edition of 

 his verse, 'No life is perfect that has not been lived, youth in 

 feeling, manhood in battle, old age in meditation," and that very 

 same day someone said to me in London when I spoke of him " His 

 life has been lived for freedom." That full life of his has, more 

 happily than many, found its record not only in public action but in 

 the intensity of lyrical expression — as an earlier poet has said 

 "outward to man — inward to the Gods." He tells in these diaries 



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