Owen Barfield is unique in havin combined the work of a solicitor wit the profession of literature. In the latter his speciality has been the province of speech and words, and the history and philosophy of meaning. His works on these subjects have long won enthusiastic recognition in university circles, but are now reaching a wider public. He has been described by C. S. Lewis as 'the wisest of my unofficial advisers' and T. S. Eliot wrote of his Saving the Appearances that it was 'one of the few books which made me proud to be director of the firm which published them.' He has always been interested in the relation between poetry, philosophy, science and religion, and at the Goethe Centenary he gave a Broadcast talk on the BBC on the third programme on Goethe's scientific writings. He has recently returned from the USA, where he has spent two years as a visiting professor of Philosophy and Letters at Drew University and of English Literature at Brandeis. He early encountered the work of Rudolf Steiiner and soon recognized the immense contribution that Steiner had made towards a true understanding of the world and of man. The essays in this volume are at once the fruit of his study of Steiner's work and a new approach to that work from the angle of English literature. They form perhaps the best introduction to Steiner's work for the English literary mind. Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.