Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands

Arthur Symons's collection of twenty-six essays on travel in Spain, life in London, and sojourns among islands and sea-coasts of France, England, and Ireland first appeared in the United States in 1919. In The New Republic, noted writer and critic Padraic Colum remarked that "it is not an artist's sketch-book nor is it a writer's note-book: it is a book in which the most remarkable of the impressionist writers, and the one. with the most singular curiosity, gives finished studies of places that for him have history". Symons's verbal portraits of these places, whether bold and colorful or sensitive and merely suggestive, are as intriguing and interesting today as when he first wrote them.From the author's dedication to the painter Augustus John to the last evocative description of the White Cliffs at Dover standing sentinel at the edge of England, this edition brings back into print an unusual and vivid work by one of Victorian Britain's finest litterateurs. A brilliant editor, translator, and critic, Symons is now perhaps best known as the chief chronicler of fin de siecle European art and literature of the Symbolist and Decadent movements.