The Project Gutenberg EBook of The House of Souls, by Arthur Machen

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Title: The House of Souls

Author: Arthur Machen

Release Date: April 7, 2008 [EBook #25016]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The
House of Souls

By Arthur Machen

_Short Story Index Reprint Series_

AYER COMPANY PUBLISHERS, INC.
NORTH STRATFORD, NH 03590

First Published 1922

Reprint Edition, 1999
AYER Company Publishers, Inc.
Lower Mill Road
North Stratford, NH 03590

INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER:
0-8369-3806-2

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:
72-152947

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Transcriber's Note:

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. The
oe ligature is shown as [oe].

Contents

A Fragment of Life 1

The White People 111

The Great God Pan 167

The Inmost Light 245

Introduction

_It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the
thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the
modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in
literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier part of the
seventeenth century had always had a peculiar attraction for me. I
accustomed myself to write in it, to think in it; I kept a diary in that
manner, and half-unconsciously dressed up my every day thoughts and
common experiences in the habit of the Cavalier or of the Caroline
Divine. Thus, when in 1884 I got a commission to translate the
Heptameron, I wrote quite naturally in the language of my favourite
period, and, as some critics declare, made my English version somewhat
more antique and stiff than the original. And so "The Anatomy of
Tobacco" was an exercise in the antique of a different kind; and "The
Chronicle of Clemendy" was a volume of tales that tried their hardest to
be mediaeval; and the translation of th