them now, is a pleasant sense of sitting out in the
apple-trees in the wonderful Andover Junes, and "noticing" new
books-with which Boston publishers kept me supplied. For whatever
reason, the weeklies gave me all I could do at this sort of thing. In
its course I formed some pleasant acquaintances; among others that of
Jean Ingelow. I have never seen this poet, whom I honor now as much as
I admired then; but charming little notes, and books of her own, with
her autograph, reached me from time to time for years. I remember
when "The Gates Ajar" appeared, that she frankly called it "Your most
strange book."

This brings me to say: I have been so often and so urgently asked to
publish some account of the history of this book, that perhaps I need
crave no pardon of whatever readers these papers may command, for
giving more of our space to the subject than it would otherwise occur
to one to do to a book so long behind the day.

Of what we know as literary ambition, I believe myself to have been
as destitute at that time as any girl who ever put pen to paper. I was
absorbed in thought and feeling as far removed from the usual class
of emotions or motives which move men and women to write, as Wachusett
was from the June lilies burning beside the moonlit cross in my
father's garden. Literary ambition is a good thing to possess; and I
do not at all suggest that I was superior to it, but simply apart from
it. Of its pangs and ecstasies I knew little, and thought less.

I have been asked, possibly a thousand times, whether I looked upon
that little book as in any sense the result of inspiration, whether
what is called spiritualistic, or of any other sort. I have always
promptly said "No," to this question. Yet sometimes I wonder if that
convenient monosyllable in deed and truth covers the whole case.

When I remember just how the book came to be, perceive the
consequences of its being, and recall the complete unconsciousness of
the young author as to their probable nature, there are moments when I
am fain to answer the question by asking another: "What do we mean by
inspiration?"

That book grew so naturally, it was so inevitable, it was so
unpremeditated, it came so plainly from that something not one's self
which makes for uses in which one's self is extinguished, that there
are times when it seems to me as if I had no more to do with the
writing of it than the bough through which the wind cries, or the wave
by means of wh