o the public without any apology or excuse,
but I have been apologising for it ever since, in one way--without avail.
I wished that at least one-fifth of it had not been published; but my
apology was never heard till now as I withdraw from this edition of A
Lover's Diary some twenty-five sonnets representing fully one-fifth of
the original edition. As it now stands the faint thread of narrative is
more distinct, and redundancy of sentiment and words is modified to some
extent at any rate. Such material story as there is, apart from the
spiritual history embodied in the sonnets, seems more visible now, and
the reader has a clearer revelation of a young, aspiring, candid mind
shadowed by stern conventions of thought, dogma, and formula, but
breaking loose from the environment which smothered it. The price it
pays for the revelation is a hopeless love informed by temptation, but
lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the
inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished
and the toll of the journey of understanding paid.

The six sonnets in italics, beginning with 'The Bride', and ending with
'Annunciation', have nothing to do with the story further than to show
two phases of the youth's mind before it was shaken by speculation,
plunged into the sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had
found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character,
and give new impulse and direction to personal force and individual
sense. These were written when I was twenty and twenty-one years of age,
and the sonnet sequence of 'A Lover's Diary' was begun when I was
twenty-three. They were continued over seven years in varying quantity.
Sometimes two or three were written in a week, and then no more would be
written for several weeks or maybe months, and it is clearly to be seen
from the text, from the change in style, and above all in the nature of
the thought that between 'The Darkened Way', which ends one epoch, and
'Reunited', which begins another and the last epoch, were intervening
years.

The sonnet which begins the book and particularly that which ends the
book have been very widely quoted, and 'Envoy' has been set to music by
more than one celebrated musician. Whatever the monotony of a sonnet
sequence (and it is a form which I should not have chosen if I had been
older and wiser) there has been a continuous, if limited, demand for the
little book. A