The Project Gutenberg EBook of Joyous Gard, by Arthur Christopher Benson

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Title: Joyous Gard

Author: Arthur Christopher Benson

Release Date: January 22, 2007 [EBook #20423]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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JOYOUS GARD

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1913

TO
ALL MY FRIENDS
KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

PREFACE

_It is a harder thing than it ought to be to write openly and frankly
of things private and sacred. "Secretum meum mihi!"--"My secret is my
own!"--cried St. Francis in a harrowed moment. But I believe that the
instinct to guard and hoard the inner life is one that ought to be
resisted. Secrecy seems to me now a very uncivilised kind of virtue,
after all! We have all of us, or most of us, a quiet current of
intimate thought, which flows on, gently and resistlessly, in the
background of our lives, the volume and spring of which we cannot
alter or diminish, because it rises far away at some unseen source,
like a stream which flows through grassy pastures, and is fed by rain
which falls on unknown hills from the clouds of heaven. This inner
thought is hardly affected by the busy incidents of life--our work,
our engagements, our public intercourse; but because it represents the
self which we are always alone with, it makes up the greater part of
our life, and is much more our real and true life than the life which
we lead in public. It contains the things which we feel and hope,
rather than what we say; and the fact that we do not speak our inner
thoughts is what more than anything else keeps us apart from each
other.

In this book I have said, or tried to say, just what I thought, and as
I thought it; and since it is a book which recommends a studied
quietness and a cheerful serenity of life, I have put my feelings to a
vigorous test, by writing it, not when I was at ease and in leisure,
but in the very thickest and fullest of my work. I thought that if t