The Project Gutenberg EBook of Green Mansions, by W. H. Hudson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Green Mansions
A Romance of the Tropical Forest

Author: W. H. Hudson

Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #942]
Release Date: June, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREEN MANSIONS ***

Produced by Dianne Bean

GREEN MANSIONS

A Romance of the Tropical Forest

by W. H. Hudson

FOREWORD

I take up pen for this foreword with the fear of one who knows that he
cannot do justice to his subject, and the trembling of one who would
not, for a good deal, set down words unpleasing to the eye of him who
wrote Green Mansions, The Purple Land, and all those other books which
have meant so much to me. For of all living authors--now that Tolstoi
has gone I could least dispense with W. H. Hudson. Why do I love his
writing so? I think because he is, of living writers that I read, the
rarest spirit, and has the clearest gift of conveying to me the nature
of that spirit. Writers are to their readers little new worlds to be
explored; and each traveller in the realms of literature must needs have
a favourite hunting-ground, which, in his good will--or perhaps merely
in his egoism--he would wish others to share with him.

The great and abiding misfortunes of most of us writers are twofold: We
are, as worlds, rather common tramping-ground for our readers,
rather tame territory; and as guides and dragomans thereto we are too
superficial, lacking clear intimacy of expression; in fact--like guide
or dragoman--we cannot let folk into the real secrets, or show them the
spirit, of the land.

Now, Hudson, whether in a pure romance like this Green Mansions, or in
that romantic piece of realism The Purple Land, or in books like Idle
Days in Patagonia, Afoot in England, The Land's End, Adventures
among Birds, A Shepherd's Life, and all his other nomadic records of
communings with men, birds, beasts, and Nature, has a supreme gift of
disclosing not only the thing he sees but the spirit of his vision.
Without apparent effort he takes you with him into a rare, free, natural
world, and always you are refreshed, stimulated, enlarg