Excerpt from Essays in Freedom and Rebellion Naturally, I like to dedicate this little book to my many friends in the United States, and I can only wish it might be taken as some return for the pleasure their charm and intellectual sympathy have given me. It is but a collection of short essays written from time to time during the last fifteen or twenty years, as occasion suggested. But the essays do truly represent thoughts and observations gathered in the course of a varied and active life, which may now, unfortunately, be called long. There was an old Greek who boasted that all his life he had folllowed War and the Muses. For more than thirty years I too have followed and studied War, but no love of adventure or exercise of any military faculty I possess has ever blinded me to War's inevitable abomination. From childhood I have followed the Muses with passionate worship as the revealers of hidden realities in Nature and human Life. But Nature and human Life have been more to me than the highest imaginations of the Muses themselves, and a fulness of Life, transfused with a poignant delight in Nature, has been my reward. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.