The Project Gutenberg eBook, My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale, by Thomas
Woolner, Edited by Henry Morley

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Title: My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale

Author: Thomas Woolner

Editor: Henry Morley

Release Date: January 22, 2006 [eBook #17574]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY BEAUTIFUL LADY. NELLY DALE***

Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition, David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

MY BEAUTIFUL LADY.
NELLY DALE.

BY
THOMAS WOOLNER, R.A.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1887.

INTRODUCTION.

"A ray has pierced me from the highest heaven--
I have believed in worth; and do believe."

So runs Mr. Woolner's song, as it proceeds to show the issue of a noble
earthly love, one with the heavenly. Its issue is the life of high
endeavour, wherein

"They who would be something more
Than they who feast, and laugh and die, will hear
The voice of Duty, as the note of war,
Nerving their spirits to great enterprise,
And knitting every sinew for the charge."

This Library is based on a belief in worth, and on a knowledge of the
wide desire among men now to read books that are books, which "do," as
Milton says, "contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that
soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the
purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."
When, therefore, as now happens for the second time, a man of genius who
has written with a hope to lift the hearts and minds of men by adding one
more true book to the treasures of the land, honours us by such
recognition of our aim, and fellow-feeling with it, that he gives up a
part of his exclusive right to his own work, and offers to make it freely
current with the other volumes of our series,--we take the gift, if we
may dare to say so, in the spirit of the giver, and are the happier for
such evidence that we are not working in vain.

Such evidence comes in other forms: as in letters from remote readers in
lonely settlements, from the far West, from sheep-farms in Australi