Algernon Charles Swinburne Author:Algernon Charles Swinburne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EXTRACTS FROM THE PRIVATE LETTERS OF ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE Editor's Note THE letters of Swinburne from which the following extracts are drawn we... more »re placed in my hands by his youngest and last surviving sister before her death, with full permission to make any use of them in the sketch I proposed to publish. It is always a difficult and delicate matter to make a selection, among private letters, of what is allowable or advisable to publish—especially in consideration of the extreme dislike to publicity shared by the writer and the receivers of such letters as are before us. They were found, however, to contain so many interesting references, so many exquisite descriptions of places and persons, and so many sentiments and expressions of personal opinion, as to throw in various cases a fresh light upon the character of the great man who wrote them, and to place that character before the world inquite a new aspect. Thus I have allowed myself to quote freely from the descriptive passages, and in the quotations of a more intimate kind I endeavoured to choose those that reveal his true nature, and unaltered affection for his family. I have endeavoured to keep the excerpts more or less together, according to their subjects —whether relating to distinguished persons, foreign travel, descriptions of country, and of children, or concerned with his own works; and the more personal extracts, as showing the terms on which he stood with his relatives— giving the periods as far as possible in chronological order. The years are not in all cases given, but the references and the handwriting enable them to be placed with fair accuracy. Swinburne's handwriting underwent a considerable change during his lifetime. As a schoolboy and even in his Oxford days, it is small and cramped...« less