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This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory. As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past, and the mind busies itself with what Henry James has called “the irresistible reconstruction, to the all too baffled vision, of irrevocable presences and aspects, the conscious, shining, mocking void, sad somehow with excess of serenity.”

Such a research is not a mere catalogue of memories. I have no new theory of Time to propound, but I would declare my belief that it preserves and quickens rather than destroys. An experience, especially in youth, is quickly overlaid by others, and is not at the moment fully comprehended. But it is overlaid, not lost. Time hurries it from us, but also keeps it in store, and it can later be recaptured and amplified by memory, so that at leisure we can interpret its meaning and enjoy its savour.

These chapters are so brazenly egotistic that my first intention was to have them privately printed. But I reflected that a diary of a pilgrimage, a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of life, might interest others who travel a like road. It is not a book of reminiscences in the ordinary sense, for my purpose has been to record only a few selected experiences. The lover of gossip will find nothing to please him, for I have written at length only of the dead. Nor is it an autobiography, for I cannot believe that the external incidents of my life are important enough to be worth chronicling in detail. And it is only in a meagre sense a confession of faith. It is a record of the impressions made upon me by the outer world, rather than a weaving of such impressions into a personal religion and philosophy. Some day I may attempt the latter.

I have included one or two passages from a little book, These for Remembrance, of which a few copies were printed privately in 1919.

J. B.