Glimpses of Bengal

The letters translated in this book span the most produc¬tive period of my literary life when owing to great good fortune I was young and less known. Youth being exuberant and leisure ample I felt the writing of letters other than business ones to be a delight¬ful necessity. This is a form of literary extravagance only possible when a surplus of thought and emotion accumu¬lates. Other forms of literature remain the author’s and are made public for his good; letters that have been given to private individuals once for all are therefore character¬ised by the more generous abandonment. It so happened that selected extracts from a large number of such letters found their way back to me years after they had been written. It had been rightly conjec¬tured that they would delight me by bringing to mind the memory of days when under the shelter of obscurity I enjoyed the greatest freedom my life has ever known.