There was a touch of masculine irony and humour about this that took my

fancy; and we went to the house, Miss ---- saying that two new persons

in one afternoon would be rather a strain for her uncle, much as he

would enjoy it, and that his enjoyment must be severely limited. "His

illness," she said, "is an obscure one; it is a want of adequate

nervous force: the doctors give it names, but don't seem to be able to

cure or relieve it; he is strong, physically and mentally, but the

least over-exertion or over-strain knocks him up; it is as if virtue

went out of him; though a partial niece may say that he has a plentiful

stock of the material."

We went in, and proceeded to a small library, full of books, with a big

writing-table in the window. The room was somewhat dark, and the feet

fell softly on a thick carpet. There was no sort of luxury about the

room; a single portrait hung over the mantelpiece, and there was no

trace of ornament anywhere, except a big bowl of roses on a table.

Here, with a low table beside him covered with books, and a little

reading-desk pushed aside, I found Mr. ---- sitting. He was leaning

forwards in his chair, and Maud was sitting opposite him. They appeared

to be silent, but with the natural silence that comes of reflection,

not the silence of embarrassment. Maud, I could see, was strangely

moved. He rose up to greet me, a tall, thin figure, dressed in a rough

grey suit. There was little sign of physical ill-health about him. He

had a shock of thick, strong hair, perfectly white. His face was that

of a man who lived much in the open air, clear and ascetic of

complexion. He was not at all what would be called handsome; he had

rather heavy features, big, white eyebrows, and a white moustache. His

manner was sedate and extremely unaffected, not hearty, but kindly, and

he gave me a quick glance, out of his blue eyes, which seemed to take

swift stock of me. "It is very kind of you to come and see me," he said

in a measured tone. "Of course I ought to have paid my respects first,

but I ventured to take the privilege of age; and moreover I am the

obedient property of a very vigilant guardian, whose orders I

implicitly obey--'Do this, and he doeth it.'" He smiled at his niece as

he said it, and she said, "Yes, you would hardly believe how peremptory

I can be; and I am going to show it by taking Mrs. ---- away, to show

her the garden; and in twenty minutes I must take Mr. ---- away too, if

he will be so kind as help me to sustain my authority."

The old man sate down again, smiling, and pointed me to a chair. The

other two left us; and there followed what was to me a very memorable

conversation. "We must make the best use of our time, you see," he

said, "though I hope that this will not be the last time we shall meet.

You will confer a very great obligation on me, if you can sometimes

come to see me--and perhaps we may get a walk together occasionally. So

we won't waste our time in conventional remarks," he added; "I will

only say that I am heartily glad you have come to live here, and I am

sure you will find it a beautiful place--you are wise enough to prefer

the country to the town, I gather." Then he went on: "I have read all

your books--I did not read them," he added with a smile, "that I might

talk to you about them, but because they have interested me. May I say

that each book has been stronger and better than the last, except in

one case"--he mentioned the name of a book of mine--"in which you

seemed to me to be republishing earlier work." "Yes," I said, "you are

quite right; I was tempted by a publisher and I fell." "Well," he said,

"the book was a good one--and there is something that we lose as we

grow older, a sort of youthfulness, a courageous indiscretion, a

beautiful freedom of thought; but we can't have everything, and one's

books must take their appropriate colours from the mind. May I say that

I think your books have grown more and more mature, tolerant, artistic,

wise?--and the last was simply admirable. It entirely engrossed me, and

for a blessed day or two I lived in your mind, and saw out of your

eyes. I am sure it was a great book--a noble and a large-hearted book,

full of insight and faith--the best kind of book." I murmured

something; and he said, "You may think it is arrogant of me to speak

like this; but I have lived among books, and I am sure that I have a

critical gift, mainly because I have no power of expression. You know

the best kind of critics are the men who have tried to write books, and

have failed, as long as their failure does not make them envious and

ungenerous; I have failed many times, but I think I admire good work

all the more for that. You are writing now?" "No," I said, "I am

writing nothing." "Well, I am sorry to hear it," he said, "and may I

venture to ask why?" "Simply because I cannot," I said; and now there

came upon me a strange feeling, the same sort of feeling that one has

in answering the questions of a great and compassionate physician, who

assumes the responsibility of one's case. Not only did I not resent

these questions, as I should often have resented them, but it seemed to

give me a sense of luxury and security to give an account of myself to

this wise and unaffected old man. He bent his brows upon me: "You have

had a great sorrow lately?" he said. "Yes," I said, "we have lost our

only boy, nine years old." "Ah," he said, "a sore stroke, a sore

stroke!" and there was a deep tenderness in his voice that made me feel

that I should have liked to kneel down before him, and weep at his

knee, with his hand laid in blessing on my head. We sate in silence for

a few moments. "Is it this that has stopped your writing?" he said.

"No," I said, "the power had gone from me before--I could not

originate, I could only do the same sort of work, and of weaker quality

than before." "Well," he said, "I don't wonder; the last book must have

been a great strain, though I am sure you were happy when you wrote it.

I remember a friend of mine, a great Alpine climber, who did a

marvellous feat of climbing some unapproachable peak--without any sense

of fatigue, he told me, all pure enjoyment--but he had a heart-attack

the next day, and paid the penalty of his enjoyment. He could not climb

for some years after that." "Yes," I said, "I think that has been my

case--but my fear is that if I lose the habit--and I seem to have lost

it--I shall never be able to take it up again." "No, you need not fear

that," he replied; "if something is given you to say, you will be able

to say it, and say it better than ever--but no doubt you feel very much

lost without it. How do you fill the time?" "I hardly know," I said,

"not very profitably--I read, I teach my daughter, I muddle along."

"Well," he said, smiling, "the hours in which we muddle along are not

our worst hours. You believe in God?" The suddenness of this question

surprised me. "Yes," I said, "I believe in God. I cannot disbelieve.

Something has placed me where I am, something urges me along; there is

a will behind me, I am sure of that. But I do not know whether that

will is just or unjust, kind or unkind, benevolent or indifferent. I

have had much happiness and great prosperity, but I have had to bear

also things which are inconceivably repugnant to me, things which seem

almost satanically adapted to hurt and wound me in my tenderest and

innermost feelings, trials which seem to be concocted with an almost

infernal appropriateness, not things which I could hope to bear with

courage and faith, but things which I can only endure with rebellious

resistance." "Yes," he said, "I understand you perfectly; but does not

their very appropriateness, the satanical ingenuity of which you speak,

help you to feel that they are not fortuitous, but sent deliberately to

you yourself and to none other?" "Yes," I said, "I see that; but how

can I believe in the justice of a discipline which I could not inflict,

I will not say upon a dearly loved child, but upon the most relentless

and stubborn foe." "Ah," said he, "now I see your heart bare, the very

palpitating beat of the blood. Do you think you are alone in this? Let

me tell you my own story. Over fifty years ago I left Oxford with, I

really think I may say, almost everything before me--everything, that

is, which is open to an instinctively cheerful, temperate, capable,

active man--I was not rich, but I could afford to wait to earn money. I

was sociable and popular; I was endowed with an immense appetite for

variety of experience; I don't think that there was anything which

appeared to me to be uninteresting. But I could persevere too, I could

stick to work, I had taken a good degree. Then an accidental fall off a

chair, on which I was standing to get a book, laid me on my back for a

time. I fretted over it at first, but when I got about again, I found

that I was a man maimed for life. I don't know what the injury

was--some obscure lesion of the spinal marrow or brain, I believe--some

flaw about the size of a pin's head--the doctors have never made out.

But every time that I plunged into work, I broke down; for a long time

I thought I should struggle through; but at last I became aware that I

was on the shelf, with other cracked jars, for life--I can't tell you

what I went through, what agonies of despair and rebellion. I thought

that at least literature was left me. I had always been fond of books,

and was a good scholar, as it is called; but I soon became aware that I

had no gift of expression, and moreover that I could not hope to

acquire it, because any concentrated effort threw me into illness. I

was an ambitious fellow, and success was closed to me--I could not even

hope to be useful. I tried several things, but always with the same

result; and at last I fell into absolute despair, and just lived on,

praying daily and even hourly that I might die. But I did not die, and

then at last it dawned upon me, like a lightening sunrise, that THIS

was life for me; this was my problem, these my limitations; that I was

to make the best I could out of a dulled and shattered life; that I was

to learn to be happy, even useful, in spite of it--that just as other

people were given activity, practical energy, success, to learn from

them the right balance, the true proportion of life, and not to be

submerged and absorbed in them, so to me was given a simpler problem

still, to have all the temptations of activity removed--temptations to

which with my zest for experience I might have fallen an easy

victim--and to keep my courage high, my spirit pure and expectant, if I

could, waiting upon God. This little estate fell to me soon afterwards,

and I soon saw what a tender gift it was, because it gave me a home;

every other source of interest and pleasure was removed, because the

simplest visits, the wildest distractions were too much for me--the

jarring of any kind of vehicle upset me. By what slow degrees I

attained happiness I can hardly say. But now, looking back, I see

this--that whereas others have to learn by hard experience, that

detachment, self-purification, self-control are the only conditions of

happiness on earth, I was detached, purified, controlled by God

Himself. I was detached, because my life was utterly precarious, I was

taught purification and control, because whereas more robust people can

defer and even defy the penalties of luxury, comfort, gross desires,

material pleasures, I was forced, every day and hour, to deny myself

the smallest freedom--I was made ascetic by necessity. Then came a

greater happiness still; for years I was lost in a sort of

individualistic self-absorption, with no thoughts of anything but God

and His concern with myself--often hopeful and beautiful enough--when I

found myself drawn into nearer and dearer relationships with those

around me. That came through my niece, whom I adopted as an orphan

child, and who is one of those people who live naturally and

instinctively in the lives of other people. I got to know all the

inhabitants of this little place--simple country people, you will

say--but as interesting, as complex in emotion and intellect, as any

other circle in the world. The only reason why one ever thinks people

dull and limited, is because one does not know them; if one talks

directly and frankly to people, one passes through the closed doors at

once. Looking back, I can see that I have been used by God, not with

mere compassion and careless tenderness, but with an intent, exacting,

momentary love, of an almost awful intensity and intimacy. It is the

same with all of us, if we can only see it. Our faults, our weaknesses,

our qualities good or bad, are all bestowed with an anxious and

deliberate care. The reason why some of us make shipwreck--and even

that is mercifully and lovingly dispensed to us--is because we will not

throw ourselves on the side of God at every moment. Every time that the

voice says 'Do this,' or 'Leave that undone,' and we reply fretfully,

'Ah, but I have arranged otherwise,' we take a step backwards. He

knocks daily, hourly, momently, at the door, and when we have once

opened, and He is entered, we have no desire again but to do His will

to the uttermost." He was silent for a moment, his eyes in-dwelling

upon some secret thought; then he said, "Everything about you, your

books, your dear wife, your words, your face, tell me that you are very

near indeed to the way--a step or two, and you are free!" He sate back

for a moment, as though exhausted, and then said: "You will forgive me

for speaking so frankly, but I feel from hour to hour how short my time

may be; and I had no doubt when I saw you, even before I saw you, that

I should have some message to give you, some tidings of hope and

patience."

I despair, as I write, of giving any idea of the impressiveness of the

old man; now that I have written down his talk, it seems abrupt and

even strained. It was neither. The perfect naturalness and tranquillity

of it all, the fatherly smile, the little gestures of his frail hand,

interpreted and filled up the gaps, till I felt as though I had known

him all my life, and that he was to me as a dear father, who saw my

needs, and even loved me for what I was not and for what I might be.

At this point Miss ---- came in, and led me away. As Maud and I walked

back, we spoke to each other of what we had seen and heard. He had

talked to her, she said, very simply about Alec. "I don't know how it

was," she added, "but I found myself telling him everything that was in

my mind and heart, and it seemed as though he knew it all before."

"Yes, indeed," I said, "he made me desire with all my heart to be

different--and yet that is not true either, because he made me wish not

to be something outside of myself, but something inside, something that

was there all the time: I seem never to have suspected what religion

was before; it had always seemed to me a thing that one put on and

wore, like a garment; but now it seems to me to be the most natural,

simple, and beautiful thing in the world; to consist in being oneself,

in fact." "Yes, that is exactly it," said Maud, "I could not have put

it into words, but that is how I feel." "Yes," I said, "I saw, in a

flash, that life is not a series of things that happen to us, but our

very selves. It is not a question of obeying, and doing, and acting,

but a question of being. Well, it has been a wonderful experience; and

yet he told me nothing that I did not know. God in us, not God with

us." And presently I added: "If I were never to see Mr. ---- again, I

should feel he had somehow done more for me than a hundred

conversations and a thousand books. It was like the falling of the

spirit at Pentecost."

That strange sense of an uplifted freedom, of willing co-operation has

dwelt with me, with us both, for many days. I dare not say that life

has become easy; that the cloud has rolled away; that there have not

been hours of dismay and dreariness and sorrow. But it is, I am sure, a

turning-point of my life; the way which has led me downwards, deepening

and darkening, seems to have reached its lowest point, and to be

ascending from the gloom; and all from the words of a simple, frail old

man, sitting among his books in a panelled parlour, in a soft, summer

afternoon.

July 10, 1890.

I have been sitting out, this hot, still afternoon, upon the lawn,

under the shade of an old lime-tree, with its sweet scent coming and

going in wafts, with the ceaseless murmur of the bees all about it; but

for that slumberous sound, the place was utterly still; the sun lay

warm on the old house, on the box hedges of the garden, on the rich

foliage of the orchard. I have been lost in a strange dream of peace

and thankfulness, only wishing the sweet hours could stay their course,

and abide with me thus for ever. Part of the time Maggie sate with me,

reading. We were both silent, but glad to be together; every now and

then she looked up and smiled at me. I was not even visited by the

sense that used to haunt me, that I must bestir myself, do something,

think of something. It is not that I am less active than formerly; it

is the reverse. I do a number of little things here, trifling things

they would seem, not worth mentioning, mostly connected with the

village or the parish. My writing has retired far into the past, like a

sort of dream. I never even plan to begin again. I teach a little, not

Maggie only, but some boys and girls of the place, who have left

school, but are glad to be taught in the evenings. I have plenty of

good easy friends here, and have the blessed sense of feeling myself

wanted. Best of all, a sense of poisonous hurry seems to have gone out

of my life. In the old days I was always stretching on to something,

the end of my book, the next book--never content with the present,

always hoping that the future would bring me the satisfaction I seemed

to miss. I did not always know it at the time, for I was often happy

when I was writing a book--but it was, at best, a rushing, tortured

sort of happiness. My great sorrow--what has that become to me? A

beautiful thing, full of patience and hope. What but that has taught me

to learn to live for the moment, to take the bitter experiences of life

as they come, not crushing out the sweetness and flinging the rind

aside, but soberly, desirously, only eager to get from the moment what

it is meant to bring. Even the very shrinking back from a bitter duty,

the indolent rejection of the thought that touches one's elbow, bidding

one again and again arise and go, means something; to defer one's

pleasure, to break the languid dream, to take up the tiny task, what

strength is there! Thus no burden seems too heavy, too awkward, too

slippery, too ill-shaped, but one can lift it. The yoke is easy,

because one bears it in quiet confidence, not overtaxing ability or

straining hope. Instead of watching life, as from high castle windows,

feeling it common and unclean, not to be mingled with, I am in it and

of it. And what is become of all my old dreams of art, of the secluded

worship, the lonely rapture! Well, it is all there, somehow, flowing

inside life, like a stream that is added to a river, not like a leat

drawn aside from the current. The force I spent on art has gone to

swell life and augment it; it heightens perception, it intensifies

joy--it was the fevered lust of expression that drained the vigour of

my days and hours.

But am I then satisfied with the part I play? Do I feel that my

faculties are being used, that I am lending a hand to the great sum of

toil? I used to feel that, or thought I felt it, in the old days, but

now I see that I walked in a vain delusion, serving my own joy, my own

self-importance. Not that I think my old toil all ill-spent; that was

my work before, as surely as it is not now; but the old intentness, the

old watching for tone and gesture, for action and situation, that has

all shifted its gaze, and waits upon God. It may be, nay it is certain,

that I have far to go, much to learn; but now that I may perhaps

recover my strength, life spreads out into sunny shallows, moving slow

and clear. It is like a soft sweet interlude between two movements of

fire and glow; for I see now, what then I could not see, that something

in my life was burnt and shrivelled up in my enforced silence and in my

bitter loss--then, when I felt my energies at their lowest, when mind

and bodily frame alike flapped loose, like a flag of smut upon the bars

of a grate, I was living most intensely, and the soul's wings grew

fast, unfolding plume and feather. It was then that life burnt with its

fiercest heat, when it withdrew me, faintly struggling, away from all

that pleased and caressed the mind and the body, into the silent glow

of the furnace. Strange that I should not have perceived it! But now I

see in all maimed and broken lives, the lives that seem most idle and

helpless, most futile and vain, that the same fierce flame is burning

bright about them; that the reason why they cannot spread and flourish,

like flowers, into the free air, is because the strong roots are

piercing deep, entwining themselves firmly among the stones, piercing

the cold silent crevices of the earth. Ay, indeed! The coal in the

furnace, burning passively and hotly, is as much a force, though it but

lies and suffers, as the energy that throbs in the leaping piston-rod

or the rushing wheel. Not in success and noise and triumph does the

soul grow; when the body rejoices, when the mind is prodigal of seed,

the spirit sits within in a darkened chamber, like a folded chrysalis,

stiff as a corpse, in a faint dream. But when triumphs have no savour,

when the cheek grows pale and the eye darkens, then the dark chrysalis

opens, and the rainbow wings begin to spread and glow, uncrumpling to

the suns of paradise. My soul has taken wings, and sits poised and

delicate, faint with long travail, perhaps to hover awhile about the

garden blooms and the chalices of honied flowers, perhaps to take her

flight beyond the glade, over the forest, to the home of her desirous

heart. I know not! Yet in these sunlit hours, with the slow, strong

pulse of life beating round me, it seems that something is preparing

for one struck dumb and crushed with sorrow to the earth. How soft a

thrill of hope throbs in the summer air! How the bird-voices in the

thicket, and the rustle of burnished leaves, and the hum of insects,

blend into a secret harmony, a cadence half-heard! I wait in love and

confidence; and through the trees of the garden One seems ever to draw

nearer, walking in the cool of the day, at whose bright coming the

flowers look upwards unashamed. Shall I be bidden to meet Him! Will He

call me loud or low?

August 25, 1890.

Maud has been ailing of late--how much it is impossible to say, because

she is always cheerful and indomitable. She never complains, she never

neglects a duty; but I have found her, several times of late, sitting

alone, unoccupied, musing--that is unlike her--and with a certain

shadow upon her face that I do not recognise; but the strange, new,

sweet companionship in which we live seems at the same time to have

heightened and deepened. I seem to have lived so close to her all these

years, and yet of late to have found a new and different personality in

her, which I never suspected. Perhaps we have both changed somewhat; I

do not feel the difference in myself. But there is something larger,

stronger, deeper about Maud now, as if she had ascended into a purer

air, and caught sight of some unexpected, undreamed-of distance; but

instead of giving her remoteness, she seems to be sharing her wider

outlook with me; she was never a great talker--perhaps it was that in

old days my own mind ran like an ebullient fountain, evoking no

definite response, needing no interchange; but she was always a sayer

of penetrating things. She has a wonderful gift of seeing the firm

issue through a cloud of mixed suggestions; but of late there has been

a richness, a generosity, a wisdom about her which I have never

recognised before. I think, with contrition, that I under-estimated,

not her judgment or instinct, but her intellect. I am sure I lived too

much in the intellectual region, and did not guess how little it really

solves, in what a limited region it disports itself. I see that this

wisdom was hers all along, and that I have been blind to it; but now

that I have travelled out of the intellectual region, I perceive what a

much greater thing that further wisdom is than I had thought. Living in

art and for art, I used to believe that the intellectual structure was

the one thing that mattered, but now I perceive dimly that the mind is

but on the threshold of the soul, and that the artist may, nay does,

often perceive, by virtue of his trained perception, what is going on

in the sanctuary; but he is as one who kneels in a church at some great

solemnity--he sees the movements and gestures of the priests; he sees

the holy rite proceeding, he hears the sacred words; something of the

inner spirit of it all flows out to him; but the viewless current of

prayer, the fiery ray streaming down from God, that smites itself into

the earthly symbol--all this is hidden from him. Those priests, intent

upon the sacred work, feel something that they not only do not care to

express, but which they would not if they could; it would be a

profanation of the awful mystery. The artist is not profane in

expressing what he perceives, because he can be the interpreter of the

symbol to others more remote; but he is not a real partaker of the

mystery; he is a seer of the word and not a doer. What now amazes me is

that Maud, to whom the heart of the matter, the inner emotion, has

always been so real, could fling herself, and all for love of me, into

the outer work of intellectual expression. I have always, God forgive

me, believed my work to be in some way superior to hers. I loved her

truly, but with a certain condescension of mind, as one loves a child

or a flower; and now I see that she has been serenely ahead of me all

the time, and it has been she that has helped me along; I have been as

the spoilt and wilful child, and she as the sweet and wise mother, who

has listened to its prattle, and thrown herself, with all the infinite

patience of love, into the tiny bounded dreams. I have told her all

this as simply as I could, and though she deprecated it all generously

and humbly, I feel the blessed sense of having caught her up upon the

way, of seeing--how dimly and imperfectly!--what I have owed her all

along. I am overwhelmed with a shame which it is a sweet pleasure to

confess to her; and now that I can spare her a little, anticipate her

wishes, save her trouble, it is an added joy; a service that I can

render and which she loves to receive. I never thought of these things

in the old days; she had always planned everything, arranged

everything, forestalled everything.

I have at last persuaded her to come up to town and see a doctor. We

plan to go abroad for a time. I would earn the means if I could, but,

if not, we will sacrifice a little of our capital, and I will replace

it, if I can, by some hack-work; though I have a dislike of being paid

for my name and reputation, and not for my best work.

I am not exactly anxious; it is all so slight, what they call a want of

tone, and she has been through so much; even so, my anxiety is

conquered by the joy of being able to serve her a little; and that joy

brings us together, hour by hour.

September 6, 1890.

Again the shadow comes down over my life. The doctor says plainly that

Maud's heart is weak; but he adds that there is nothing organically

wrong, though she must be content to live the life of an invalid for a

time; he was reassuring and quiet; but I cannot keep a dread out of my

mind, though Maud herself is more serene than she has been for a long

time; she says that she was aware that she was somehow overtaxing

herself, and it is a comfort to be bidden, in so many words, to abstain

a little. We are to live quietly at home for a while, until she is

stronger, and then we shall go abroad.

Maud does not come down in the mornings now, and she is forbidden to do

more than take the shortest stroll. I read to her a good deal in the

mornings; Maggie has proudly assumed the functions of housekeeper; the

womanly instinct for these things is astonishing. A man would far

sooner not have things comfortable, than have the trouble of providing

them and seeing about them. Women do not care about comforts for

themselves; they prefer haphazard meals, trays brought into rooms,

vague arrangements; and yet they seem to know by instinct what a man

likes, even though he does not express it, and though he would not take

any trouble to secure it. What centuries of trained instincts must have

gone to produce this. The new order has given me a great deal more of

Maggie's society. We are sent out in the afternoon, because Maud likes

to be quite alone to receive the neighbours, small and great, that come

to see her, now that she cannot go to see them. She tells me frankly

that my presence only embarrasses them. And thus another joy has come

to me, one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me in

my life, and which I can hardly find words to express--the contact

with, the free sight of the mind and soul of an absolutely pure, simple

and ingenuous girl. Maggie's mind has opened like a flower. She talks

to me with perfect openness of all she feels and thinks; to walk thus,

hour by hour, with my child's arm through my own, her wide-opened,

beautiful eyes looking in mine, her light step beside me, with all her

pretty caressing ways--it seems to me a taste of the purest and

sweetest love I have ever felt. It is like the rapture of a lover, but

without any shadow of the desirous element that mingles so fiercely and

thirstily with our mortal loves, to find myself dear to her. I have a

poignant hunger of the heart to save her from any touch of pain, to

smooth her path for her, to surround her with beauty and sweetness. I

did not guess that the world held any love quite like this; there seems

no touch of selfishness about it; my love lavishes itself, asking for

nothing in return, except that I may be dear to her as she to me.

Her fancies, her hopes, her dreams--how inexplicable, how adorable! She

said to me to-day that she could never marry, and that it was a real

pity that she could not have children of her own without. "We don't

want any one else, do we, except just some little children to amuse

us." She is a highly imaginative child, and one of our amusements is to

tell each other long, interminable tales of the adventures of a family

we call the Pickfords. I have lost all count of their names and ages,

their comings and goings; but Maggie never makes a mistake about them,

and they seem to her like real people; and when I sometimes plunge them

into disaster, she is so deeply affected that the disasters have all to

be softly repaired. The Pickfords must have had a very happy life; the

kind of life that people created and watched over by a tender, patient

and detailed Providence might live. How different from the real world!

But I don't want Maggie to live in the real world yet awhile. It will

all come pouring in upon her, sorrow, anxiety, weariness, no

doubt--alas that it should be so! Perhaps some people would blame me,

would say that more discipline would be bracing, wholesome,

preparatory. But I don't believe that. I had far rather that she learnt

that life was tender, gentle and sweet--and then if she has to face

trouble, she will have the strength of feeling that the tenderness,

gentleness and sweetness are the real stuff of life, waiting for her

behind the cloud. I don't want to disillusion her; I want to establish

her faith in happiness and love, so that it cannot be shaken. That is a

better philosophy, when all is said and done, than the stoical

fortitude that anticipates dreariness, that draws the shadow over the

sun, that overvalues endurance. One endures by instinct; but one must

be trained to love.

February 6, 1891.

It is months since I have opened this book; it has lain on my table all

through the dreadful hours--I write the word down conventionally, and

yet it is not the right word at all, because I have merely been stunned

and numbed. I simply could not suffer any more. I smiled to myself, as

the man in the story, who was broken on the wheel, smiled when they

struck the second and the third blow. I knew why he smiled; it was

because he had dreaded it so much, and when it came there was nothing

to dread, because he simply did not feel it.

To-night I just pick up idly the dropped thread. Perhaps it is a sign,

this faint desire to make a little record, of the first tingling of

returning life. Something stirs in me, and I will not resist it; it may

be read by some one that comes after me, by some one perhaps who feels

that his own grief is supreme and unique, and that no one has ever

suffered so before. He may learn that there have been others in the

dark valley before him, that the mist is full of pilgrims stumbling on,

falling, rising again, falling again, lying stupefied in a silence

which is neither endurance nor patience.

Maud was taken from me first; she went without a word or a sign. She

was better that day, she declared, than she had felt for some time; she

was on the upward grade. She walked a few hundred yards with Maggie and

myself, and then she went back; the last sight I had of her alive was

when she stood at the corner and waved her hand to us as we went out of

sight. I am glad I looked round and saw her smile. I had not the

smallest or faintest premonition of what was coming; indeed, I was

lighter of mood than I had been for some time. We came in; we were told

that she was tired and had gone up to lie down. As she did not come

down to tea, I went up and found her lying on her bed, her head upon

her hand--dead. The absolute peace and stillness of her attitude showed

us that she had herself felt no access of pain. She had lain down to

rest, and she had rested indeed. Even at my worst and loneliest, I have

been able to be glad that it was even so. If I could know that I should

die thus in joy and tranquillity, it would be a great load off my mind.

But the grief, the shock to Maggie was too much for my dear,

love-nurtured child. A sort of awful and desperate strength came on me

after that; I felt somehow, day by day, that I must just put away my

own grief till a quiet hour, in order that I might sustain and guard

the child; but her heart was broken, I think, though they say that no

one dies of sorrow. She lay long ill--so utterly frail, so appealing in

her grief, that I could think of nothing but saving her. Was it a kind

of selfishness that needed to be broken down in me? Perhaps it was!

Every single tendril of my heart seemed to grow round the child and

clasp her close; she was all that I had left, and in some strange way

she seemed to be all that I had lost too. And then she faded out of

life, not knowing that she was fading, but simply too tired to live;

and my desire alone seemed to keep her with me. Till at last, seeing

her weariness and weakness, I let my desire go; I yielded, I gave her

to God, and He took her, as though He had waited for my consent.

And now that I am alone, I will say, with such honesty as I can muster,

that I have no touch of self-pity, no rebellion. It is all too deep and

dark for that. I am not strong enough even to wish to die; I have no

wishes, no desires at all. The three seem for ever about me, in my

thoughts and in my dreams. When Alec died, I used to wake up to the

fact, day after day, with a trembling dismay. Now it is not like that.

I can give no account of what I do. The smallest things about me seem

to take up my mind. I can sit for an hour by the hearth, neither

reading nor thinking, just watching the flame flicker over the coals,

or the red heart of the fire eating its way upwards and outwards. I can

sit on a sunshiny morning in the garden, merely watching with a strange

intentness what goes on about me, the uncrumpling leaf, the snowdrop

pushing from the mould, the thrush searching the lawn, the robin

slipping from bough to bough, the shapes of the clouds, the dying ray.

I seem to have no motive either to live or to die. I retrace in memory

my walks with Maggie, I can see her floating hair, and how she leaned

to me; I can sit, as I used to sit reading by Maud's side, and see her

face changing as the book's mood changed, her clear eye, her strong

delicate hands. I seem as if I had awaked from a long and beautiful

dream. People sometimes come and see me, and I can see the pity in

their faces and voices; I can see it in the anxious care with which my

good servants surround me; but I feel that it is half disingenuous in

me to accept it, because I need no pity. Perhaps there is something

left for me to do in the world: there seems no reason otherwise why I

should linger here.

Mr. ---- has been very good to me; I have seen him almost daily. He

seems the only person who perfectly understands. He has hardly said a

word to me about my sorrow. He said once that he should not speak of

it; before, he said, I was like a boy learning a lesson with the help

of another boy, but that now I was being taught by the Master Himself.

That may be so; but the Master has a very scared and dull pupil, alas,

who cannot even discern the letters. I care nothing whether God be

pleased or displeased; I bear His will, without either pain or

resistance. I simply feel as if there had been some vast and

overwhelming mistake somewhere; a mistake so incredible and

inconceivable that nothing else mattered; as if--I do not speak

profanely--God Himself were appalled at what He had done, and dared not

smite further one whom He had stunned into silence and apathy.

With Mr. ---- I talk; he talks of simple, quiet things, of old books

and thoughts. He tells me, sometimes, when I am too weary to speak,

long, beautiful, quiet stories of his younger days, and I listen like a

child to his grave voice, only sorry when it comes to an end. So the

days pass, and I will not say I have no pleasure in them, because I

have won back a sort of odd childish pleasure in small incidents,

sights, and sounds. The part of me that can feel seems to have been

simply cut gently away, and I live in the hour, just glad when the sun

is out, sorry when it is dull and cheerless.

I read the other day one of my old books, and I could not believe it

was mine. It seemed like the voice of some one I had once known long

ago, in a golden hour. I was amused and surprised at my own quickness

and inventiveness, at the confidence with which I interpreted

everything so glibly and easily. I cannot interpret any more, and I do

not seem to desire to do so. I seem to wait, with a half-amused smile,

to see if God can make anything out of the strange tangle of things, as

a child peers in within a scaffolding, and sees nothing but a forest of

poles, little rising walls of chambers, a crane swinging weights to and

fro. What can ever come, he thinks, out of such strange confusion, such

fruitless hurry?

Well, I will not write any more; a sense of weariness and futility

comes over me. I will go back to my garden to see what I can see, only

dumbly and mutely thankful that it is not required of me to perform any

dull and monotonous task, which would interrupt my idle dreams.

February 8, 1891.

I tried this morning to look through some of the old letters and papers

in Maud's cabinet. There were my own letters, carefully tied up with a

ribbon; letters from her mother and father; from the children when we

were away from them. I began to read, and was seized with a sharp,

unreasoning pain, surprised by sudden tears. I seemed dumbly to resent

this, and I put them all away again. Why should I disturb myself to no

purpose? "There shall be no more sorrow nor crying, for the former

things are passed away"--so runs the old verse, and I had almost grown

to feel like that. Why distrust it? Yet I could not forbear. I got the

papers out again, and read late into the night, like one reading an old

and beautiful story. Suddenly the curtain lifted, and I saw myself

alone, I saw what I had lost. The ineffectual agony I endured, crying

out for very loneliness! "That was all mine," said the melting heart,

so long frozen and dumb. Grief, in waves and billows, began to beat

upon me like breakers on a rock-bound shore. A strange fever of the

spirit came on me, scenes and figures out of the years floating

fiercely and boldly past me. Was my strength and life sustained for

this, that I should just sleep awhile, and wake to fall into the pit of

suffering, far deeper than before?

If they could but come back to me for a moment; if I could feel Maud's

cheek by mine, or Maggie's arms round my neck; if they could but stand

by me smiling, in robes of light! Yet as in a vision I seem to see them

leaning from a window, in a blank castle-wall rising from a misty

abyss, scanning a little stairway that rises out of the clinging fog,

built up through the rocks and ending in a postern gate in the

castle-wall. Upon that stairway, one by one emerging from the mist,

seem to stagger and climb the figures of men, entering in, one by one,

and the three, with smiles and arms interlaced, are watching eagerly.

Cannot I climb the stair? Perhaps even now I am close below them, where

the mist hangs damp on rock and blade? Cannot I set myself free? No, I

could not look them in the face, they would hide their eyes from me, if

I came in hurried flight, in passionate cowardice. Not so must I come

before them, if indeed they wait for me.

The morning was coming in about the dewy garden, the birds piping faint

in thicket and bush, when I stumbled slowly, dizzied and helpless, to

my bed. Then a troubled sleep; and ah, the bitter waking; for at last I

knew what I had lost.

February 10, 1891.

"All things become plain to us," said the good vicar, pulling on his

gloves, "when we once realise that God is love--Perfect Love!" He said

good-bye; he trudged off to his tea, a trying visit manfully

accomplished, leaving me alone.

He had sate with me, good, kindly man, for twenty minutes. There were

tears in his eyes, and I valued that little sign of human fellowship

more than all the commonplaces he courageously enunciated. He talked in

a soft, low tone, as if I was ill. He made no allusions to mundane

things; and I am grateful to him for coming. He had dreaded his call, I

am sure, and he had done it from a mixture of affection and duty, both

good things.

"Perfect Love, yes--if we could feel that!" I sate musing in my chair.

I saw, as in a picture, a child brought up in a beautiful and stately

house by a grave strong man, who lavished at first love and tenderness,

ease and beauty, on the child, laughing with him, and making much of

him; all of which the child took unconsciously, unthinkingly, knowing

nothing different; running to meet his guardian, glad to be with him,

sorry to leave him.

Then I saw in my parable that one day, when the child played in the

garden, as he had often played before, he noticed a little green alley,

with a pleasant arch of foliage, that he had never seen before, leading

to some secluded place. The child was dimly aware that there were parts

of the garden where he was supposed not to go; he had been told he must

not go too far from the house, but it was all vague and indistinct in

his mind; he had never been shown anything precisely, or told the

limits of his wanderings. So he went in joy, with a sense of a sweet

mystery, down the alley, and presently found himself in a still

brighter and more beautiful garden, full of fruits growing on the

ground and on the trees, which he plucked and ate. There was a

building, like a pavilion, at the end, of two storeys; and while he

wandered thither with his hands full of fruits, he suddenly saw his

guardian watching him, with a look he had never seen on his face

before, from the upper windows of the garden-house. His first impulse

was to run to him, share his joy with him, and ask him why he had not

been shown the delicious place; but the fixed and inscrutable look on

his guardian's face, neither smiling nor frowning, the stillness of his

attitude, first chilled the child and then dismayed him; he flung the

fruits on the ground and shivered, and then ran out of the garden. In

the evening, when he was with his guardian, he found him as kind and

tender as ever. But his guardian said nothing to him about the inner

garden of fruits, and the child feared to ask him.

But the next day he felt as though the fruits had given him a new

eagerness, a new strength; he hankered after them long, and at last

went down the green path again; this time the summer-house seemed

empty. So he ate his fill, and this he did for many days. Then one day,

when he was bending down to pluck a golden fruit, that lay gem-like on

the ground among green leaves, he heard a sudden step behind him, and

turning, saw his guardian draw swiftly near, with a look of anger on

his face; the next instant he was struck down, again and again; lifted

from the ground at last, as in a passion of rage, and flung down

bleeding on the earth; and then, without a word, his guardian left him;

at first he lay and moaned, but then he crawled away, and back to the

house. And there he found the old nurse that tended him, who greeted

him with tears and words of comfort, and cared for his hurts. And he

asked her the reason of his hard usage, but she could tell him nothing,

only saying that it was the master's will, and that he sometimes did

thus, though she thought he was merciful at heart.

The child lay sick many days, his guardian still coming to him and

sitting with him, with gentle talk and tender offices, till the scene

in the garden was like an evil dream; but as his guardian spoke no word

of displeasure to the child, the child still feared to ask him, and

only strove to forget. And then at last he was well enough to go out a

little; but a few days after--he avoided the inner garden now out of a

sort of horror--he was sitting in the sun, near the house, feebly

trying to amuse himself with one of his old games--how poor they seemed

after the fruits of the inner paradise, how he hankered desirously

after the further place, with its hot, sweet, fragrant scents, its rich

juices!--when again his guardian came upon him in a sudden wrath, and

struck him many times, dashing him down to the ground; and again he

crept home, and lay long ill, and again his guardian was unwearyingly

kind; but now a sort of horror of the man grew up in the mind of the

child, and he feared that his strange anger might break out at any

moment in a storm of blows.

And at last he was well again; and had half forgotten, in the constant

kindness, and even merriment, of his guardian, the horror of the two

assaults. He was out and about again; he still shunned the paradise of

fruits, but wearying of the accustomed pleasaunce, he went further and

passed into the wood; how cool and mysterious it was among the great

branching trees! the forest led him onwards; now the sun lay softly

upon it, and a stream bickered through a glade, and now the path lay

through thickets, which hid the further woodland from view; and now

passing out into a more open space, he had a thrill of joy and

excitement; there was a herd of strange living creatures grazing there,

great deer with branching horns; they moved slowly forwards, cropping

the grass, and the child was lost in wonder at the sight. Presently one

of them stopped feeding, began to sniff the air, and then looking

round, espied the child, and began slowly to approach him. The child

had no terror of the great dappled stag, and held out his hand to him,

when the great beast suddenly bent his head down, and was upon him with

one bound, striking him with his horns, lifting him up, smiting him

with his pointed hooves. Presently the child, in his terror and

faintness, became aware that the beast had left him, and he began to

drag himself, all bruised as he was, along the glade; then he suddenly

saw his guardian approaching, and cried out to him, holding out his

hands for help and comfort--and his guardian strode straight up to him,

and, with the same fierce anger in his face, struck at him again and

again, and spurned him with his feet. And then, when he left him, the

child at last, with accesses of deadly faintness and pain, crept back

home, to be again tended by the old nurse, who wept over him; and the

child found that his guardian came to visit him, as kind and gentle as

ever. And at last one day when he sate beside the child, holding his

hand, stroking his hair, and telling him an old tale to comfort him,

the child summoned up courage to ask him a question about the garden

and the wood; but at the first word his guardian dropped his hand, and

left him without a word.

And then the child lay and mused with fierce and rebellious thoughts.

He said to himself, "If my guardian had told me where I might not go;

if he had said to me, 'in the inner garden are unwholesome fruits, and

in the wood are savage beasts; and though I am strong and powerful, yet

I have not strength to root up the poisonous plants and make the place

a wilderness; and I cannot put a fence about it, or a fence about the

wood, that no one should enter; but I warn you that you must not enter,

and I entreat you for the love I bear you not to go thither,'" then the

child thought that he would not have made question, but would have

obeyed him willingly; and again he thought that, if he had indeed

ventured in, and had eaten of the evil fruits, and been wounded by the

savage stag, yet if his guardian had comforted him, and prayed him

lovingly not to enter to his hurt, that then he would have loved his

guardian more abundantly and carefully. And he thought too that, if his

guardian had ever smitten him in wrath, and had then said to him with

tears that it had grieved him bitterly to hurt him, but that thus and

thus only could he learn the vileness of the place, then he would have

not only forgiven the ill-usage, but would even have loved to endure it

patiently. But what the child could not understand was that his

guardian should now be tender and gracious, and at another time hard

and cruel, explaining nothing to him. And thus the child said in

himself, "I am in his power, and he must do his will upon me; but I

neither trust nor love him, for I cannot see the reason of what he

does; though if he would but tell me the reason, I could obey him and

submit to him joyfully." These hard thoughts he nourished and fed upon;

and his guardian came no more to him for good or for evil; and the

child, much broken by his hard usage and his angry thoughts, crept

about neglected and spiritless, with nothing but fear and dismay in his

heart.

So the imagination shaped itself in my mind, a parable of the sad,

strange life of man.

"Perfect Love!" If it were indeed that? Yet God does many things to His

frail children, which if a man did, I could not believe him to be

loving; though if He would but give us the assurance that it was all

leading us to happiness, we could endure His fiercest stroke, His

bitterest decree. But He smites us, and departs; He turns away in a

rage, because we have broken a law that we knew not of. And again, when

we seem most tranquil and blest, most inclined to trust Him utterly, He

smites us down again without a word. I hope, I yearn to see that it all

comes from some great and perfect will, a will with qualities of which

what we know as mercy, justice, and love are but faint shadows--but

that is hidden from me. We cannot escape, we must bear what God lays

upon us. We may fling ourselves into bitter and dark rebellion; still

He spares us or strikes us, gives us sorrow or delight. My one hope is

to cooperate with Him, to accept the chastening joyfully and

courageously. Then He takes from me joy, and courage alike, till I know

not whom I serve, a Father or a tyrant. Can it indeed help us to doubt

whether He be tyrant or no? Again I know not, and again I sicken in

fruitless despair, like one caught in a great labyrinth of crags and

precipices.

February 14, 1891.

Then the Christian teacher says: "God has given you a will, an

independent will to act and choose; put it in unison with His will."

Alas, I know not how much of my seeming liberty is His or mine. He

seems to make me able to exert my will in some directions, able to make

it effective; and yet in other matters, even though I see that a course

is holy and beautiful, I have no power to follow it at all. I see men

some more, some less hampered than myself. Some seem to have no desire

for good, no dim perception of it. The outcast child, brought up

cruelly and foully, with vile inheritances, he is not free, as I use

the word; sometimes, by some inner purity and strength, he struggles

upwards; most often he is engulfed; yet it is all a free gift, to me

much, to another little, to some nothing at all. With all my heart do I

wish my will to be in harmony with His. I yield it up utterly to Him. I

have no strength or force, and He withholds them from me. I do not

blame, I only ask to understand; He has given me understanding, and has

put in my heart a high dream of justice and love; why will He not show

me that He satisfies the dream? I say with the old Psalmist, "Lo, I

come," but He comes not forth to meet me; He does not even seem to

discern me when I am yet a long way off, as the father in the parable

discerned his erring son.

Then the Christian teacher says to me that all is revealed in Christ;

that He reconciles, not an angry God to a wilful world, but a grieved

and outraged world to a God who cannot show them He is love.

Yet Christ said that God was all-merciful and all-loving, and that He

ordered the very falling of a single hair of our heads. But if God

ordered that, then He did not leave unordered the qualities of our

hearts and wills, and our very sins are of His devising.

No, it is all dark and desperate; I do not know, I cannot know; I shall

stumble to my end in ignorance; sometimes glad when a gleam of sunshine

falls on my wearied limbs, sometimes wrapping my garments around me in

cold and drenching rain. I am in the hand of God; I know that; and I

hope that I may dare to trust Him; but my confidence is shaken as He

passes over me, as the reed in the river shakes in the wind.

February 18, 1891.

A still February day, with a warm, steady sun, which stole in and

caressed me, enveloping me in light and warmth, as I sate reading this

morning. If I could be ashamed of anything, I should be ashamed of the

fact that my body has all day long surprised me by a sort of indolent

contentment, repeating over and over that it is glad to be alive. The

mind and soul crave for death and silence. Yet all the while my

faithful and useful friend, the body, seems to croon a low song of

delight. That is the worst of it, that I seem built for many years of

life. Shall I learn to forget?

I walked long and far among the fields, in the fresh, sun-warmed air.

Ah! the sweet world! Everything was at its barest and austerest--the

grass thin in the pastures, the copses leafless. But such a sense of

hidden life everywhere! I stood long beside the gate to watch the

new-born lambs, whose cries thrilled plaintively on the air, like the

notes of a violin. Little black-faced grey creatures, on their high,

stilt-like legs--a week or two old, and yet able to walk, to gambol, to

rejoice, in their way, to reflect. The bleating mothers moved about,

divided between a deep desire to eat, and the anxious care of their

younglings. One of them stood over her sleeping lamb, stamping her

feet, to dismay me, no doubt, while the little creature lay like a

folded door-mat on the pasture. Another brutally repelled the advances

of a strange lamb, butting it over whenever it drew near; another

chewed the cud, while its lamb sucked, its eyes half closed in

contented joy, just turning from time to time to sniff at the little

creature pressed close to its side. I felt as if I had never seen the

sight before, this wonderful and amazing drama of life, beginning again

year after year, the same, yet not the same.

The old shepherd came out with his crook, said a few words to me, and

moved off, the ewes following him, the lambs skipping behind. "He shall

feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the waters of

comfort." How perfectly beautiful and tender the image, a thing seen

how many hundred years ago on the hills of Bethlehem, and touching the

old heart just as it touches me to-day!

And yet, alas, to me to-day the image seems to miss the one thing

needful; how all the images of guide and guardian and shepherd fail

when applied to God! For here the shepherd is but a little wiser, a

little stronger than his flock. He sees their difficulties, he feels

them himself. But with God, He is at once the Guide, and the Creator of

the very dangers past which He would lead us. If we felt that God

Himself were dismayed and sad in the presence of evils that He could

not touch or remedy, we should turn to Him to help us as He best could.

But while we feel that the very perplexities and sufferings come from

His hand, how can we sincerely ask Him to guard us from things which He

originates, or at least permits? Why should they be there at all, if

His concern is to help us past them; or how can we think that He will

lead us past them, when they are part of His wise and awful design?

And thus one plunges again into the darkness. Can it indeed be that

God, if He be all-embracing, all-loving, all-powerful, can create or

allow to arise within Himself something that is not, Himself, alien to

Him, hostile to Him? How can we believe in Him and trust Him, if this

indeed be so?

And yet, looking upon that little flock to-day, I did indeed feel the

presence of a kind and fatherly heart, of something that grieved for my

pain, and that laid a hand upon my shoulder, saying, "Son, endure for a

little; be not so disquieted!"

March 8, 1891.

Something--far-off, faint, joyful--cried out suddenly in the depths of

my spirit to-day. I felt--I can but express it by images, for it was

too intangible for direct utterance--as a woman feels when her child's

life quickens within her; as a traveller's heart leaps up when, lost

among interminable hills, he is hailed by a friendly voice; as the

river-water, thrust up into creeks and estuaries by the incoming tide,

is suddenly freed by the ebb from that stealthy pressure, and flows

gladly downwards; as the dark garden-ground may feel when the frozen

soil melts under warm winds of spring, and the flower-roots begin to

swell and shoot.

Some such thrill it was that moved in the silence of the soul, showing

that the darkness was alive.

It came upon me as I walked among soft airs to-day. It was no bodily

lightness that moved me, for I was unstrung, listless, indolent; but it

was a sense that it was good to live, lonely and crushed as I was; that

there was something waiting for me which deserved to be approached with

a patient expectation--that life was enriched, rather than made

desolate by my grief and losses; that I had treasure laid up in heaven.

It came upon me as a fancy, but it was something better than that, that

one or other of my dear ones had perhaps awaked in the other world, and

had sent out a thought in search of me. I had often thought that if,

when we are born into this world of ours, our first years are so dumb

and unperceptive, it might be even so in the world beyond; that we are

there allowed to rest a little, to sleep; and that has seemed to me to

be perhaps the explanation why, in those first sad days of grief, when

the mourner aches to have some communication with the vanished soul,

and when the soul that has passed the bounds of life would be desiring

too, one would think, to send some message back, why, I say, there is

no voice nor hint nor sign. Perhaps the reason why our grief loses its

sting after a season is that the soul we have loved does contrive to

send some healing influence into the desolate heart.

I know not; but as I stood upon the hill-top to-day at evening, the

setting sun gilding the cloud-edges, and touching the horizon with a

delicate misty azure, my spirit did indeed awake with a smile, with a

murmured word of hope.

If I, who have lost everything that can enrich and gladden life, can

yet feel that inalienable residue of hope, which just turns the balance

on the side of desiring still to live, it must be that life has

something yet in store for me--I do not hope for love, I do not desire

the old gift of expression again; but there is something to learn, to

apprehend, to understand. I have learnt, I think, not to grasp at

anything, not to clasp anything close to my heart; the dream of

possession has fled from me; it will be enough if, as I learn the

lesson, I can ease a few burdens and help frail feet along the road.

Duty, pleasure, work--strange names which we give to life, perversely

separating the strands of the woven thread, they hold no meaning for me

now--I do not expect to be free from suffering or from grief; but I

will no more distinguish them from other experiences saying, this is

joyful, and I will take all I can, or this is sad, and I will fly from

it. I will take life whole, not divide it into pieces and choose. My

grief shall be like a silent chapel, lit with holy light, into which I

shall often enter, and bend, not to frame mechanical prayers, but to

submit myself to the still influence of the shrine. It is all my own

now, a place into which no other curious eye can penetrate, a guarded

sanctuary. My sorrow seems to have plucked me with a strong hand out of

the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes; and I see now

that I could not have rescued myself; that I should have gone on

battling with the current, catching at the river wrack, in the hopes of

saving something from the stream. Now I am face to face with God; He

saves me from myself, He strips my ragged vesture from me and I stand

naked as He made me, unashamed, nestling close to His heart.

April 3, 1891.

A truth which has come home to me of late with a growing intensity is

that we are sent into the world for the sake of experience, not

necessarily for the sake of immediate happiness. I feel that the

mistake we most of us make is in reaching out after a sense of

satisfaction; and even if we learn to do without that, we find it very

difficult to do without the sense of conscious growth. I say again that

what we need and profit by is experience, and sometimes that comes by

suffering, helpless, dreary, apparently meaningless suffering. Yet when

pain subsides, do we ever, does any one ever wish the suffering had not

befallen us? I think not. We feel better, stronger, more pure, more

serene for it. Sometimes we get experience by living what seems to be

an uncongenial life. One cannot solve the problem of happiness by

simply trying to turn out of one's life whatever is uncongenial. Life

cannot be made into an Earthly Paradise, and it injures one's soul even

to try. What we can turn out of our lives are the unfruitful, wasteful,

conventional things; and one can follow what seems the true life,

though one may mistake even that sometimes. One of the commonest

mistakes nowadays is that so many people are haunted with a vague sense

that they ought to DO GOOD, as they say. The best that most people can

do is to perform their work and their obvious duties well and

conscientiously.

If we realise that experience is what we need, and not necessarily

happiness or contentment, the whole value of life is altered. We see

then that we can get as much or even more out of the futile hour when

we are held back from our chosen delightful work, even out of the

dreary or terrified hour, when the sense of some irrevocable neglect,

some base surrender that has marred our life, sinks burning into the

soul, as a hot ember sinks smoking into a carpet. Those are the hours

of life when we move and climb; not the hours when we work, and eat,

and laugh, and chat, and dine out with a sense of well-merited content.

The value of life is not to be measured by length of days or success or

tranquillity, but by the quality of our experience, and the degree in

which we have profited by it. In the light of such a truth as this, art

seems to fade away as just a pleasant amusement contrived by leisurely

men for leisurely men.

Then, further, one grows to feel that such easy happiness as comes to

us may be little more than the sweetening of the bitter medicine, just

enough to give us courage and heart to live on; that applies, of

course, only to the commoner sorts of happiness, when one is busy and

merry and self-satisfied. Some sorts of happiness, such as the best

kind of affection, are parts of the larger experience.

Then, if we take hold of such experience in the right way, welcoming it

as far as possible, not resisting it or trying to beguile it or forget

it, we can get to the end of our probation quicker; if, that is, we let

the truth burn into us, instead of timidly shrinking away from it.

This seems to me the essence of true religion; the people who cling

very close to particular creeds and particular beliefs seem to me to

lose robustness; it is like trying to go to heaven in a bath-chair! It

retards rather than hastens the apprehension of the truth. Here lies,

to my mind, the unreality of mystical books of devotion and piety,

where one is instructed to practise a servile sort of abasement, and to

beg forgiveness for all one's noblest efforts and aspirations. Neither

can I believe that the mystical absorption, inculcated by such books,

in the human personality, the human sufferings of Christ, is wholesome,

or natural, or even Christian. I cannot imagine that Christ Himself

ever recommended such a frame of mind for an instant. What we want is a

much simpler sort of Christianity. If a man had gone to Christ and

expressed a desire to follow Him, Christ, I believe, would have wanted

to know whether he loved others, whether he hated sin, whether he

trusted God. He would not have asked him to recite the articles of his

belief, and still less have suggested a mystical and emotional sort of

passion for His own Person. As least I cannot believe it, and I see

nothing in the Gospels which would lead me to believe it.

In any case this belief in our experience being sent us for our far-off

ultimate benefit has helped me greatly of late, and will, I am sure,

help me still more. I do not practise it as I should, but I believe

with all my heart that the truth lies there.

After all, the truth IS there; it matters little that we should know

it; it is just so and not otherwise, and what we believe or do not

believe about it, will not alter it; and that is a comfort too.

April 24, 1891.

After I had gone upstairs to bed last night, I found I had left a book

downstairs which I was reading, and I went down again to recover it. I

could not find any matches, and had some difficulty in getting hold of

the book; it is humiliating to think how much one depends on sight.

A whimsical idea struck me. Imagine a creature, highly intellectual,

but without the power of sight, brought up in darkness, receiving

impressions solely by hearing and touch. Suppose him introduced into a

room such as mine, and endeavouring to form an impression of the kind

of creature who inhabited it. Chairs, tables, even a musical instrument

he could interpret; but what would he make of a writing-table and its

apparatus? How would he guess at the use of a picture? Strangest of

all, what would he think of books? He would find in my room hundreds of

curious oblong objects, opening with a sort of hinge, and containing a

series of laminae of paper, which he would discern by his delicacy of

touch to be oddly and obscurely dinted. Yet he would probably never be

able to frame a guess that such objects could be used for the

communication of intellectual ideas. What would he suppose them to be?

The thought expanded before me. What if we ourselves, in this world of

ours, which seems to us so complete, may really be creatures lacking

some further sense, which would make all our difficulties plain? We

knock up against all sorts of unintelligible and inexplicable things,

injustice, disease, pain, evil, of which we cannot divine the meaning

or the use. Yet they are undoubtedly there! Perhaps it is only that we

cannot discern the simplicity and the completeness of the heavenly

house of which they are the furniture. Fanciful, of course; but I am

inclined to think not wholly fanciful.

May 10, 1891.

The question is this: Is there a kind of peace, of tranquillity,

attainable in this world, which is proof against all calamities,

sufferings, sorrows, losses, doubts? Is it attainable for one like

myself, who is sensitive, apprehensive, highly strung, at once

confident and timid, alive to impressions, liable to swift changes of

mood? Or is it a mere matter of mental, moral, and physical health,

depending on some balance of qualities, which may or may not belong to

a man, a balance which hundreds cannot attain to?

By this peace, I do not mean a chilly indifference, or a stoical

fortitude. I do not mean the religious peace, such as I see in some

people, which consists in holding as a certainty a scheme of things

which I believe to be either untrue or uncertain--and about which, at

all events, no certainty is logically and rationally possible.

The peace I mean is a frame of mind which a man would have, who loved

passionately, who suffered acutely, who desired intensely, who feared

greatly; and yet for whom, behind love and pain, desire and fear, there

existed a sort of inner citadel, in which his soul was entrenched and

impregnable.

Such a security could not be a wholly rational thing, because reason

cannot solve the enigmas with which we are confronted; but it must not

be an irrational intuition either, because then it would be

unattainable by a man of high intellectual gifts; and the peace that I

speak of ought to be consistent with any and every

constitution--physical, moral, mental. It must be consistent with

physical weakness, with liability to strong temptations, with an

incisive and penetrating intellectual quality; its essence would be a

sort of vital faith, a unity of the individual heart with the heart of

the world. It would rise like a rock above the sea, like a lighthouse,

where a guarded flame would burn high and steady, however loudly the

surges thundered below upon the reefs, however fiercely the spray was

dashed against the glasses of the casements.

If it is attainable, then it is worth while to do and to suffer

anything to attain it; if it is not attainable, then the best thing is

simply to be as insensible as possible, not to love, not to admire, not

to desire; for all these emotions are channels along which the bitter

streams of suffering can flow.

Prudence bids one close these channels; meanwhile a fainter and remoter

voice, with sweet and thrilling accents, seems to cry to one not to be

afraid, urges one to fling open every avenue by which impassioned

experiences, uplifting thoughts, noble hopes, unselfish desires, may

flow into the soul.

This peace I have seen, or dream that I have seen, in the faces and

voices of certain gracious spirits whom I have known. It seemed to

consist in an unbounded natural gratitude, a sweet simplicity, a

childlike affectionateness, that recognised in suffering the joy of

which it was the shadow, and in desperate catastrophes the hope that

lay behind them.

Such a peace must not be a surrender of anything, a feeble

acquiescence; it must be a strong and eager energy, a thirst for

experience, a large tolerance, a desire to be convinced, a resolute

patience.

It is this and no less that I ask of God.

June 6, 1891.

I had a beautiful walk to-day. I went a short way by train, and

descending at a wayside station, found a little field-path, that led me

past an old, high-gabled, mullioned farmhouse, with all the pleasant

litter of country life about it. Then I passed along some low-lying

meadows, deep in grass, where the birds sang sweetly, muffled in

leaves. The fields there were all full of orchids, purple as wine, and

the gold of buttercups floated on the top of the rich meadow-grass.

Then I passed into a wood, and for a long time I walked in the green

glooms of copses, in a forest stillness, only the tall trees rustling

softly overhead, with doves cooing deep in the wood. Only once I passed

a house, a little cottage of grey stone, in a clearing, with an air of

settled peace about it, that reminded me of an old sweet book that I

used to read as a child, Phantastes, full of the mysterious romance of

deep forests and haunted glades. I was overshadowed that afternoon with

a sense of the ineffectiveness, the loneliness of my life, walking in a

vain shadow; but it melted out of my mind in the delicate beauty of the

woodland, with its wild fragrances and cool airs, as when one chafes

one's frozen hands before a leaping flame. They told me, those

whispering groves, of the patient and tender love of the Father, and I

drew very near His inmost heart in that gentle hour. The secret was to

bear, to endure, not stoically nor stolidly, but with a quiet

inclination of the will to sorrow and pain, that were not so bitter

after all, when one abode faithfully in them. I became aware, as I

walked, that my heart was with the future after all. The beautiful dead

past, I could be grateful for it, and not desire that it were mine

again. I felt as a man might feel who is making his way across a wide

moor. "Surely," he says to himself, "the way lies here; this ridge,

that dingle mark the track; it lies there by the rushy pool, and shows

greener among the heather." So he says, persuading himself in vain that

he has found the way; but at last the track, plain and unmistakable,

lies before him, and he loses no more time in imaginings, but goes

straight forward. It was my sorrow, after all, that had shown me that I

was in the true path. I had tried, in the old days, to fancy that I was

homeward bound; sometimes it was in the love of my dear ones, sometimes

in the joy of art, sometimes in my chosen work; and yet I knew in my

heart all the time that I was but a leisurely wanderer; but now at last

the destined road was clear; I was no longer astray; I was no longer

inventing duties and acts for myself, but I had in very truth a note of

the way. It was not the path I should have chosen in my blindness and

easiness. But there could no longer be any doubt about it. How the

false ambitions, the comfortable schemes, the trivial hopes melted away

for me in that serene certainty! What I had pursued before was the

phantom of delight; and though I still desired delight, with all the

passion of my poor frail nature, yet I saw that not thus could the real

joy of God be won. It was no longer a question of hope and

disappointment, of sin and punishment. It was something truer and

stronger than that. The sin and the suffering alike had been the Will

of God for me. I had never desired evil, though I had often fallen into

it; but there was never a moment when, if I could, I would not have

been pure and unselfish and strong. That was a blessed hour for me,

when, in place of the old luxurious delight, there came, flooding my

heart, an intense and passionate desire that I might accept with a

loving confidence whatever God might send; my wearied body, my tired,

anxious mind, were but a slender veil, rent and ruinous, that hung

between God and my soul, through which I could discern the glory of His

love.

June 20, 1891.

It was on a warm, bright summer afternoon that I woke to the sense both

of what I had lost and what I had gained. I had wandered out into the

country, for in those days I had a great desire to be alone. I stood

long beside a stile in the pastures, a little village below me, and the

gables and chimneys of an old farmhouse stood up over wide fields of

young waving wheat. A cuckoo fluted in an elm close by, and at the

sound there darted into my mind the memory, seen in an airy

perspective, of innumerable happy and careless days, spent in years

long past, with eager and light-hearted companions, in whose smiling

eyes and caressing motions was reflected one's own secret happiness.

How full the world seemed of sweet surprises then! To sit in an evening

hour in some quiet, scented garden in the gathering dusk, with the

sense of a delicious mystery flashing from the light movements, the

pensive eyes, the curve of arm or cheek of one's companion, how

beautiful that was! And yet how simple and natural it seemed. That was

all over and gone, and a gulf seemed fixed between those days and

these. And then there came first that sad and sweet regret, "the

passion of the past," as Tennyson called it, that suddenly brimmed the

eyes at the thought of the vanished days; and there followed an intense

desire to live in it once again, to have made more of it, a rebellious

longing to abandon oneself with a careless disregard to the old rapture.

Then on that mood, rising like a star into the blue spaces of the

evening, came the thought that the old days were not dead after all.

That they were assuredly there, just as the future was there, a true

part of oneself, ineffaceable, eternal. And hard on the heels of that

came another and a deeper intuition still, that not in such delights

did the secret really rest; what then was the secret? It was surely

this: that one must advance, led onward like a tottering child by the

strong arm of God. That the new knowledge of suffering and sorrow was

as beautiful as the old, and more so, and that instead of repining over

the vanished joys, one might continue to rejoice in them and even

rejoice in having lost them, for I seemed to perceive that one's aim

was not, after all, to be lively, and joyful, and strong, but to be

wiser, and larger-minded, and more hopeful, even at the expense of

delight. And then I saw that I would not really for any price part with

the sad wisdom that I had reluctantly learnt, but that though the

burden galled my shoulder, it held within it precious things which I

could not throw away. And I had, too, the glad sense that even if in a

childish petulance I would have laid my burden down and run off among

the flowers, God was stronger than I, and would not suffer me to lose

what I had gained. I might, I assuredly should, wish to be more free,

more light of heart. But I seemed to myself like a woman that had borne

a child in suffering, and that no matter how restless and vexatious a

care that child might prove to be, under no conceivable circumstances

could she wish that she were barren and without the experience of love.

I felt indeed that I had fulfilled a part of my destiny, and that I

might be glad that the suffering was behind me, even though it

separated me from the careless days.

I hope that in after days I may sometimes make a pilgrimage to the

place where that wonderful truth thus dawned upon me. I have made a

tabernacle there in my spirit, like the saints who saw the Lord

transfigured before their eyes; and to me it had been indeed a

transfiguration, in which Love and sorrow and hope had been touched

with an unearthly light of God.

June 24, 1891.

Yesterday I was walking in a field-path through the meadows; it was

just that time in early summer when the grass is rising, when flowers

appear in little groups and bevies. There was a patch of speedwell,

like a handful of sapphires cast down. Why does one's heart go out to

certain flowers, flowers which seem to have some message for us if we

could but read it? A little way from the path I saw a group of

absolutely unknown flower-buds; they were big, pale things, looking

more like pods than flowers, growing on tall stems. I hate crushing

down meadow-grass, but I could not resist my impulse of curiosity. I

walked up to them, and just as I was going to bend down and look at

them, lo and behold, all my flowers opened before my eyes as by a

concerted signal, spread wings of the richest blue, and fluttered away

before my eyes. They were nothing more than a company of butterflies

who, tired of play, had fallen asleep together with closed wings on the

high grass-stems.

There they had sate, like folded promises, hiding their azure sheen.

Perhaps even now my hopes sit motionless and lifeless, in russet robes.

Perhaps as I draw dully near, they may spring suddenly to life, and

dance away in the sunshine, like fragments of the crystalline sky.

July 8, 1891.

I was in town last week for a few days on some necessary business,

staying with old friends. Two or three people came in to dine one

night, and afterwards, I hardly know how, I found myself talking with a

curious openness to one of the guests, a woman whom I only slightly

knew. She is a very able and cultivated woman indeed, and it was a

surprise to her friends when she lately became a Christian Scientist.

When I have met her before, I have thought her a curiously guarded

personality, appearing to live a secret and absorbing life of her own,

impenetrable, and holding up a shield of conventionality against the

world. To-night she laid down her shield, and I saw the beating of a

very pure and loving heart. The text of her talk was that we should

never allow ourselves to believe in our limitations, because they did

not really exist. I found her, to my surprise, intensely emotional,

with a passionate disbelief in and yet pity for all sorrow and

suffering. She appealed to me to take up Christian Science--"not to

read or talk about it," she said; "that is no use: it is a life, not a

theory; just accept it, and live by it, and you will find it true."

But there is one part of me that rebels against the whole idea of

Christian Science--my reason. I found, or thought I found, this woman

to be wise both in head and heart, but not wise in mind. It seems to me

that pain and sorrow and suffering are phenomena, just as real as other

phenomena; and that one does no good by denying them, but only by

accepting them, and living in them and through them. One might as

truly, it seems, take upon oneself to deny that there was any such

colour as red in the world, and tell people that whenever they saw or

discerned any tinge of red, it was a delusion; one can only use one's

faculty of perception; and if sorrow and suffering are a delusion, how

do I know that love and joy are not delusions too? They must stand and

fall together. The reason why I believe that joy and love will in the

end triumph, is because I have, because we all have, an instinctive

desire for them, and a no less instinctive fear and dread of pain and

sorrow. We may, indeed I believe with all my heart that we shall,

emerge from them, but they are no less assuredly there. We triumph over

them, when we learn to live bravely and courageously in them, when we

do not seek to evade them or to hasten incredulously away from them. We

fail, if we spend our time in repining, in regretting, in wishing the

sweet and tranquil hours of untroubled joy back. We are not strong

enough to desire the cup of suffering, even though we may know that we

must drink it before we can discern the truth. But we may rejoice with

a deep-seated joy, in the dark hours, that the Hand of God is heavy

upon us. When our vital energies flag, when what we thought were our

effective powers languish and grow faint, then we may be glad because

the Father is showing us His Will; and then our sorrow is a fruitful

sorrow, and labours, as the swelling seed labours in the sombre earth

to thrust her slender hands up to the sun and air. . . .

We two sate long in a corner of the quiet lamp-lit room, talking like

old friends--once or twice our conversation was suspended by music,

which fell like dew upon my parched heart; and though I could not

accept my fellow-pilgrim's thought, I could see in the glance of her

eyes, full of pity and wonder, that we were indeed faring along the

same strange road to the paradise of God. It did me good, that talk; it

helped me with a sense of sweet and tender fellowship; and I had no

doubt that God was teaching my friend in His own fatherly way, even as

He was teaching me, and all of us.

July 19, 1891.

In one of the great windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, there

is a panel the beauty of which used to strike me even as a boy. I used

to wonder what further thing it meant.

It was, I believe--I may be wholly wrong--a picture of Reuben, looking

in an agony of unavailing sorrow into the pit from which his brothers

had drawn the boy they hated to sell him to the Midianites. I cannot

recollect the details plainly, and little remains but a memory of

dim-lit azure and glowing scarlet. Even though the pit was quaintly

depicted as a draw-well, with a solid stone coping, the pretty

absurdity of the thought only made one love the fancy better. But the

figure of Reuben!--even through an obscuring mist of crossing leads and

window-bars and weather stains, there was a poignant agony wrought into

the pose of the figure, with its clasped hands and strained gaze.

I used to wonder, I say, what further thing it meant. For the deep

spell of art is that it holds an intenser, a wider significance beneath

its symbols than the mere figure, the mere action it displays.

What was the remorse of Reuben? It was that through his weakness, his

complaisance, he had missed his chance of protecting what was secretly

dear to him. He loved the boy, I think, or at all events he loved his

father, and would not willingly have hurt the old man. And now, even in

his moment of yielding, of temporising, the worst had happened, the

child was gone, delivered over to what baseness of usage he could not

bear to think. He himself had been a traitor to love and justice and

light; and yet, in the fruitful designs of God, that very traitorous

deed was to blossom into the hope and glory of the race; the deed

itself was to be tenderly forgiven, and it was to open up, in the

fulness of days, a prospect of greatness and prosperity to the tribe,

to fling the seed of that mighty family in soil where it was to be

infinitely enriched; it was to open the door at last to a whole troop

of great influences, marvellous events, large manifestations of God.

Even so, in a parable, the figure came insistently before me all day,

shining and fading upon the dark background of the mind.

It was at the loss of my own soul that I had connived; not at its death

indeed--I had not plotted for that--but I had betrayed myself, I saw,

year by year. I had despised the dreams and visions of the frail and

ingenuous spirit; and when it had come out trustfully to me in the

wilderness, I had let it fall into the hands of the Midianites, the

purloining band that trafficked in all things, great and small, from

the beast of the desert to the bodies and souls of men.

My soul had thus lain expiring before my eyes, and now God had taken it

away from my faithless hands; I saw at last that to save the soul one

must assuredly lose it; that if it was to grow strong and joyful and

wise, it must be sold into servitude and dark afflictions. I saw that

when I was too weak to save it, God had rent it from me, but that from

the darkness of the pit it should fare forth upon a mighty voyage, and

be made pure and faithful in a region undreamed of.

To Reuben was left nothing but shame and sorrow of heart and deceit to

hide his sin; unlike him, to me was given to see, beyond the desert and

the dwindling line of camels, the groves and palaces of the land of

wisdom, whither my sad soul was bound, lonely and dismayed. My heart

went out to the day of reconciliation, when I should be forgiven with

tears of joy for my own faltering treachery, when my soul should be

even grateful for my weakness, because from that very faithlessness,

and from no other, should the new life be born.

And thus with a peaceful hope that lay beyond shame and sorrow alike,

as the shining plain lies out beyond the broken crags of the weary

mountain, I gave myself utterly into the Hands of the Father of All. He

was close beside me that day, upholding, comforting, enriching me. Not

hidden in clouds from which the wrathful trumpet pealed, but walking

with a tender joy, in a fragrance of love, in the garden, at the cool

of the day.

August 18, 1891.

Mr. ---- is dead. He died yesterday, holding my hand. The end was quite

sudden, though not unexpected. He had been much weaker of late, and he

knew he could only live a short time. I have been much with him these

last few days. He could not talk much, but there was a peaceful glory

on his face which made me think of the Pilgrims in the Pilgrim's

Progress whose call was so joyful. I never suspected how little desire

he had to live; but when he knew that his days were numbered, he

allowed something of his delight to escape him, as a prisoner might who

has borne his imprisonment bravely and sees his release draw nigh. He

suffered a good deal, but each pang was to him only like the smiting

off of chains. "I have had a very happy life," he said to me once with

a smile. "Looking back, it seems as though my later happiness had

soaked backwards through the whole fabric, so that my joy in age has

linked itself as by a golden bridge to the old childish raptures." Then

he looked curiously at me, with a half-smile, and added, "But happy as

I have been, I find it in my heart to envy you. You hardly know how

much you are to be envied. You have no more partings to fear; your

beautiful past is all folded up, to be creased and tarnished no more.

You have had the love of wife and child--the one thing that I have

missed. You have had fame too; and you have drunk far deeper of the cup

of suffering than I. I look upon you," he said laughingly, "as an old

home-keeping captain, who has never done anything but garrison duty,

might look upon a young general who has carried through a great

campaign and is covered with signs of honour."

A little while after he roused himself from a slumber to say, "You will

be surprised to find yourself named in my will; please don't have any

scruples about accepting the inheritance. I want my niece, of course,

to reign in my stead; but if you outlive her, all is to go to you. I

want you to live on in this place, to stand by her in her loneliness,

as a brother by a sister. I want you to help and work for my dear

people here, to be tender and careful for them. There are many things

that a man can do which a woman cannot; and your difficulty will be to

find a hem for your life. Remember that there is no one who is injured

by this--my niece is my only living relation; so accept this as your

post in life; it will not be a hard one. It is strange," he added,

"that one should cling to such trifles; but I should like you to take

my name, if you will; and you must find some one to succeed you; I wish

it could have been your own boy, whom I have learnt to love."

Miss ---- came in shortly after, and Mr. ---- said to her, "Yes, I have

told him, and he consents. You do consent, do you not?" I said, "Yes,

dear friend, of course I consent; and consent gratefully, for you have

given me a work in the world." And then I took Miss ----'s hand across

the bed and kissed it; the old man laid his hands upon our heads very

tenderly and said, "Brother and sister to the end."

I thought he was tired then, and made as if to leave him, but he said,

"Do not go, my son." He lay smiling to himself, as if well pleased.

Then a sudden change came over his face, and I saw that he was going;

we knelt beside him, and his last words were words of blessing.

October 12, 1891.

This book has been my companion through some very strange, sad,

terrible, and joyful hours; my faithful companion, my silent friend, my

true confessor. I have felt the need of utterance, the imperative

instinct--the most primitive, the most childish of instincts--to tell

my pains and hopes and dreams. I could not utter them, at the time, to

another. I could not let the voice of my groaning reach the ears of any

human being. Perhaps it would have been better for us both, if I could

have said it all to my dearest Maud. But a sort of courtesy forbade my

redoubling my monotonous lamentations; her burden was heavy enough

without that. I can hardly dignify it with the name of manliness or

chivalry, because my frame of mind during those first months, when I

lost the power of writing, was purely despicable; and then, too, I did

not want sympathy; I wanted help; and help no one but God could give

me; half my time was spent in a kind of dumb prayer to Him, that He

would give me some sort of strength, some touch of courage; for a

helpless cowardice was the note of my frame of mind. Well, He has sent

me strength--I recognise that now--not by lightening the load, but by

making it insupportably heavy and yet showing me that I had the

strength to carry it; I am still in the dark as to why I deserved so

sore a punishment, and I cannot yet see that the loneliness to which He

has condemned me is the help that is proportioned to my need. But I

walk no longer in a vain shadow. I have known affliction by the rod of

His wrath. But the darkness in which I walk is not the darkness of

thickening gloom, but the darkness of the breaking day.

And then, too, I suppose that writing down my thoughts from day to day

just eased the dumb pain of inaction, as the sick man shifts himself in

his bed. Anyhow it is written, and it shall stand as a record.

But now I shall write no more. I shall slip gratefully and securely

into the crowd of inarticulate and silent men and women, the vast

majority, after all, of humanity. One who like myself has the

consciousness of receiving from moment to moment sharp and clear

impressions from everything on earth, people, houses, fields, trees,

clouds, is beset by a kind of torturing desire to shape it all in words

and phrases. Why, I know not! It is the desire, I suppose, to make some

record of what seems so clear, so distinct, so beautiful, so

interesting. One cannot bear that one impression that seems so vivid

and strange should be lost and perish. It is the artistic instinct, no

doubt. And then one passes through the streets of a great city, and one

becomes aware that of the thousands that pass one by, perhaps only one

or two have the same instinct, and even they are bound to silence by

circumstance, by lack of opportunity. The rest--life is enough for

them; hunger and thirst, love and strife, hope and fear, that is their

daily meat. And life, I doubt not, is what we are set to taste. Of all

those thousands, some few have the desire, and fewer still the power,

to stand apart from the throng. These are not content with the humdrum

life of earning a livelihood, of forming ties, of passing the time as

pleasantly as they can. They desire rather to be felt, to exercise

influence, to mould others to their will, to use them for their

convenience. I have had little temptation to do that, but my life has

been poisoned at its source, I now discern, by the desire to

differentiate myself from others. I could not walk faithfully in the

procession; I was as one who likes to sit securely in his window above

the street, noting all that he sees, sketching all that strikes his

fancy, hugging his pleasure at being apart from and superior to the

ordinary run of mortals. Here lay my chiefest fault, that I could not

bear a humble hand, but looked upon my wealth, my loving circle, as

things that should fence me from the throng. I lived in a paradise of

my own devising.

But now I have put that all aside for ever. I will live the life of a

learner; I will be docile if I can. I might indeed have been stripped

of everything, bidden to join the humblest tribe of workers for daily

bread. But God has spared my weakness, and I should be faithless

indeed, if, seeing how intently His will has dealt with me, I did not

recognise the clear guiding of His hand. He has given me a place and a

quiet work to do; these strange bereavements, one after another, have

not hardened me. I feel the bonds of love for those whom I have lost

drawn closer every hour. They are waiting for me, I am sure of that. It

is not reason, it is not faith which prompts me; it is a far deeper and

stronger instinct, which I could not doubt if I would. What wonder if I

look forward with an eager and an ardent hope to death. I can conceive

no more welcome tidings than the tidings that death was at hand. But I

do not expect to die. My health of body is almost miraculously

preserved. What I dare to hope is that I may learn by slow degrees to

set the happiness of others above my own. I will listen for any sound

of grief or discontent, and I will try to quiet it. I will spend my

time and strength as freely as I can. That is a far-off hope. One

cannot in a moment break through the self-consideration of a lifetime.

But whereas, before, my dim sense that happiness could not be found by

deliberately searching for ease made me half rebellious, half

uncomfortable, I know now that it is true, and I will turn my back if I

can upon that lonely and unsatisfied quest. I did indeed--I can

honestly say that--desire with a passionate intentness the happiness of

Maud and the children; but I think I desired it most in order that the

sunshine of their happiness should break in warmth and light upon

myself. It will be hard enough--I can see that--not to labour still for

the sake of the ultimate results upon my own peace of mind. But in my

deepest heart I do not desire to do that, and I will not, God helping

me.

And so to-day, having read the whole record once again, with blinding

tears, tears of love, I think, not tears of self-pity, I will close the

book and write no more. But I will not destroy it, because it may help

some soul that may come after me, into whose hands it may fall, to

struggle on in the middle of sorrow and darkness. To him will I gladly

reveal all that God has done for my soul. That poor, pitiful, shrinking

soul, with all its faint desires after purity and nobleness and peace,

all its self-wrought misery, all its unhappy failures, all its secret

faults, its undiscerned weaknesses, I put humbly and confidently in the

hands of the God who made me. I cannot amend myself, but I can at least

co-operate with His loving Will. I can stumble onwards, with my hand in

His, like a timid child with a strong and loving father. I may wish to

be lifted in His arms, I may wonder why He does not have more pity on

my frailty. But I can believe that He is leading me home, and that His

way is the best and nearest.