Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

PREFACE
When the first edition of the book called ' My
Musical
Experiences ' had gone into the press and was about
to be published, I could but little have anticipated
that it would have met with so favourable a reception.
Not only from various parts of Great Britain and the
Continent, but even from the shores of the far Pacific,
I have received letters expressive of hearty sympathy
and grateful thanks from both amateur and professional
musicians. These letters have been to me
at once a source of mingled pleasure and perplexity.
In their pathetic confessions of failure, their allusions
to foiled aspirations and chilled enthusiasm, they have
helped me to realize, as I had, perhaps, niever done
before to the same degree, that in the difficulties
which so often impede our upward progress, the cross
currents in struggling against which so many of us
lose much of our primal native power and elasticity,
there is not a single individual who stands so entirely
by -himself as he is so often apt to imagine.
The perplexity which these letters have occasioned