LOSS AND GAIN
The soul's loneliness--My mother and her death-A mother's love for her
son--Her character-Anecdotes-A mystery and a revelation--The autumnal
migration of birds--Moonlight vigils--My absent brother's return--He
introduces me to Darwin's works--A new philosophy of life--Conclusion.
The mournful truth that a man--every man-must die alone, had been
thrust sharply into my mind and kept there by the frequent violent
attacks of my malady I suffered at that time, every one of which
threatened to be the last. And this sense and apprehension of
loneliness at the moment of the severance of all earthly ties and
parting with light and life, was perhaps the cause of the idea or
notion which possessed me, that in all our most intimate thoughts and
reflections concerning our destiny and our deepest emotions, we are
and must be alone. Anyhow, in so far as these matters are concerned, I
never had nor desired a confidant. In this connection I recall the
last words spoken to me by my younger brother, the being I loved best
on earth at that time and the one I had been more intimate with than
with any other person I have ever known. This was after the dark days
and years had been overpass, when I had had long periods of fairly
good health and had known happiness in the solitary places I loved to
haunt, communing with wild nature, with wild birds for company.
He was with me in the ship in which I had taken my passage "home," as
I insisted on calling England, to his amusement, and when we had
grasped hands for the last time and had said our last good-bye, he
added this one more last word: "Of all the people I have ever known
you are the only one I don't know."
It was a word, I imagine, never spoken by a mother of a loved son, her
insight, born of her exceeding love, being so much greater than that
of the closest friend and brother. I never breathed a word of my
doubts and mental agonizing to my mother; I spoke to her only of my
bodily sufferings; yet she knew it all, and I knew that she knew. And
because she knew and understood the temper of my mind as well, she
never questioned, never probed, but invariably when alone with me she
would with infinite tenderness in her manner touch on spiritual things
and tell me of her own state, the consolations of her faith which gave
her peace and strength in all our reverses and anxieties.
I knew, too, that her concern at my state was the greater because it
was not her first experience of a trouble of this kind. My elder long-
absent brother had scarcely ceased to be a boy before throwing off all
belief in the Christian creed and congratulating himself on having got
rid of old wives' fables, as he scornfully expressed it. But never a
word did he say to her of this change, and without a word she knew it,
and when she spoke to us on the subject nearest to her heart and he
listened in respectful silence, she knew the thought and feeling--that
was in him-that he loved her above everybody but was free of her
creed.
He had been able to cast it off with a light heart because of his
perfect health, since in that condition death is not in the mind--the
mind refuses to admit the thought of it, so remote is it in that state
that we regard ourselves as practically immortal. And, untroubled by
that thought, the mind is clear and vigorous and unfettered. What, I
have asked myself, even when striving after faith, would faith in
another world have mattered to me if I had not been suddenly sentenced
to an early death, when the whole desire of my soul was life, nothing
but life--to live for ever!
Then my mother died. Her perfect health failed her suddenly, and her
decline was not long. But she suffered much, and on the last occasion
of my being with her at her bedside she told me that she was very
tired and had no fear of death, and would be glad to go but for the
thought of leaving me in such a precarious state of health and with a
mind distressed. Even then she put no questions to me, but only
expressed the hope that her prayers for me would be answered and that
at the last we should be together again.
I cannot say, as I might say in the case of any other relation or
friend, that I had lost her. A mother's love for the child of her body
differs essentially from all other affections, and burns with so clear
and steady a flame that it appears like the one unchangeable thing in
this earthly mutable life, so that when she is no longer present it is
still a light to our steps and a consolation.
It came to me as a great surprise a few years ago to have my secret
and most cherished feelings about my own mother expressed to me as I
had never heard them expressed before by a friend who, albeit still
young, has made himself a name in the world, one who had never known a
mother, she having died during his infancy. He lamented that it had
been so, not only on account of the motherless childhood and boyhood
he had known, but chiefly because in after life it was borne in on him
that he had been deprived of something infinitely precious which
others have--the enduring and sustaining memory of a love which is
unlike any other love known to mortals, and is almost a sense and
prescience of immortality.
In reading, nothing goes to my heart like any true account of a mother
and son's love for one another, such as we find in that true book I
have already spoken of in a former chapter, Serge Aksakoff's _History
of my Childhood_. Of other books I may cite Leigh Hunt's
_Autobiography_ in the early chapters. Reading the incidents he
records of his mother's love and pity for all in trouble and her self-
sacrificing acts, I have exclaimed: "How like my mother! It is just
how she would have acted!" I will give an instance here of her loving-
kindness.
Some days after her death I had occasion to go to the house of one of
our native neighbours--the humble rancho of poor people. It was not in
my mind at the moment that I had not seen these people since my mother
died, and on coming into the living-room the old mother of the family,
who had grandchildren of my age, rose from her seat with tottering
steps to meet me, and taking my hand in hers, with tears streaming
from her eyes, cried: "She has left us! She who called me mother on
account of my years and her loving heart. It was she who was my mother
and the mother of us all. What shall we do without her?"
Only after going out and getting on my horse it occurred to me that
the old woman's memory went back to the time when she first knew my
mother, a girl-wife, many years before I was born. She could remember
numerous acts of love and compassion: that when one of her daughters
died in childbirth in that very house, my mother, who was just then
nursing me, went to give them whatever aid and comfort she could, and
finding the child alive, took it home and nursed it, with me, at her
own breasts for several days until a nurse was found.
From the time when I began to think for myself I used to wonder at her
tolerance; for she was a saint in her life, spiritually-minded in the
highest degree. To her, a child of New England parents and ancestors,
reared in an intensely religious atmosphere, the people of the pampas
among whom her lot was cast must have appeared almost like the
inhabitants of another world. They were as strange to her soul,
morally and spiritually, as they were unlike her own people outwardly
in language, dress, and customs. Yet she was able to affiliate with
them, to visit and sit at ease with them in their lowliest ranches,
interesting herself as much in their affairs as if she belonged to
them. This sympathy and freedom endeared her to them, and it was a
grief to some who were much attached to her that she was not of their
faith. She was a Protestant, and what that exactly meant they didn't
know, but they supposed it was something very bad. Protestants, some
of them held, had been concerned in the crucifixion of the Saviour; at
all events, they would not go to mass or confessional, and despised
the saints, those glorified beings who, under the Queen of Heaven, and
with the angels, were the guardians of Christian souls in this life
and their intercessors in the next. They were anxious to save her, and
when I was born, the same old dame I have told about a page or two
back, finding that I had come into the world on St. Dominic's Day, set
herself to persuade my mother to name me after that saint, that being
the religious custom of the country. For if they should succeed in
this it would be taken as a sign of grace, that she was not a despiser
of the saints and her case hopeless. But my mother had already fixed
on a name for me and would not change it for another, even to please
her poor neighbours--certainly not for such a name as Dominic; perhaps
there is not one in the calendar more obnoxious to heretics of all
denominations.
They were much hurt-it was the only hurt she ever caused them-and the
old dame and some of her people, who had thought the scheme too good
to be dropped altogether, insisted always on calling me Dominic!
My mother's sympathy and love for everybody appeared, too, in the
hospitality she delighted to exercise. That, indeed, was the common
virtue of the country, especially in the native population; but from
all my experience during my wanderings on these great plains in
subsequent years, when every night would find me a guest in a
different establishment, I never saw anything quite on a par with my
parents' hospitality. Nothing seemed to make them happier than having
strangers and travellers taking their rest with us; there were also a
good number of persons who were accustomed to make periodical visits
to the city from the southern part of the province who, after a night
with us, with perhaps half a day's rest to follow, would make our
house a regular resting-place. But no distinctions were made. The
poorest, even men who would be labelled tramps in England, travellers
on foot perhaps where cattle made it dangerous to be on foot, would be
made as welcome as those of a better class. Our delight as children,
loving fun too well, was when we had a guest of this humble
description at the supper-table. Settling down in our places at the
long table laden with good things, a stern admonitory glance from our
father would let us into the secret of the new guest's status--his
unsuitability to his surroundings. It was great fun to watch him
furtively and listen to his blundering conversational efforts, but we
knew that the least sound of a titter on our part would have been an
unpardonable offence. The poor and more uncouth, or ridiculous, from
our childish point of view, they appeared, the more anxious my mother
would be to put them at their ease. And she would sometimes say to us
afterwards that she could not laugh with us because she remembered the
poor fellow probably had a mother somewhere in a distant country who
was perhaps thinking of him at the very time he was at the table with
us, and hoping and praying that in his wanderings he would meet with
some who would be kind to him.
I remember many of these chance guests, and will give a particular
account of one--the guest and the evening we passed in his company--as
this survives with a peculiar freshness in my memory, and it was also
a cherished recollection of my mother's.
I was then nine or ten years old, and our guest was a young Spanish
gentleman, singularly handsome, with a most engaging expression and
manner. He was on a journey from Buenos Ayres to a part in our
province some sixty or seventy leagues further south, and after asking
permission to pass the night at our house, he explained that he had
only one horse, as he liked that way of travelling rather than the
native way of driving a _tropilla_ before him, going at a furious
gallop from dawn to dark, and changing horses every three or four
leagues. Having but one horse, he had to go in a leisurely way with
many rests, and he liked to call at many houses every day just to talk
with the people.
After supper, during which he charmed us with his conversation and
pure Castilian, which was like music as he spoke it, we formed a
circle before a wood fire in the dining-room and made him take the
middle seat. For he had confessed that he performed on the guitar, and
we all wanted to sit where we could see as well as listen. He tuned
the instrument in a leisurely way, pausing often to continue the
conversation with my parents, until at last, seeing how eager we all
were, he began to play, and his music and style were strange to us,
for he had no jigging tunes with fantastic flights and flourishes so
much affected by our native guitarists. It was beautiful but serious
music.
Then came another long pause and he talked again, and said the pieces
he had been playing were composed by his chief favourite, Sarasate.
He said that Sarasate had been one of the most famous guitarists in
Spain, and had composed a good deal of music for the guitar before he
had given it up for the violin. As a violinist he would win a European
reputation, but in Spain they were sorry that he had abandoned the
national instrument.
All he said was interesting, but we wanted more and more of his music,
and he played less and less and at longer intervals, and at last he
put the guitar down, and turning to my parents, said with a smile that
he begged to be excused--that he could play no more for thinking. He
owed it to them, he said, to tell them what he was thinking about;
they would then know how much they had done for his pleasure that
evening and how he appreciated it. He was, he continued, one of a
large family, very united, all living with their parents at home; and
in winter, which was cold in his part of Spain, their happiest time
was in the evening when they would gather before a big fire of oak
logs in their _solar_ and pass the time with books and conversation
and a little music and singing. Naturally, since he had left his
country years ago, the thought of that time and those evenings had
occasionally been in his mind--a passing thought and memory. On this
evening it had come in a different way, less like a memory than a
revival of the past, so that as he sat there among us, he was a boy
back in Spain once more, sitting by the fire with his brothers and
sisters and parents. With that feeling in him he could not go on
playing. And he thought it most strange that such an experience should
have come to him for the first time in that place out on that great
naked pampa, sparsely inhabited, where life was so rough, so
primitive.
And while he talked we all listened--how eagerly!--drinking in his
words, especially my mother, her eyes bright with the moisture rising
in them; and she often afterwards recalled that evening guest, who was
seen no more by us but had left an enduring image in our hearts.
This is a picture of my mother as she appeared to all who knew her. In
my individual case there was more, a secret bond of union between us,
since she best understood my feeling for Nature and sense of beauty,
and recognized that in this I was nearest to her. Thus, besides and
above the love of mother and son, we had a spiritual kinship, and this
was so much to me that everything beautiful in sight or sound that
affected me came associated with her to my mind. I have found this
feeling most perfectly expressed in some lines to the Snowdrop by our
lost poet, Dolben. I am in doubt, he wrote,
If summer brings a flower so lovable
Of such a meditative restfulness
As this, with all her roses and carnations.
The morning hardly stirs their noiseless bells;
Yet could I fancy that they whispered "Home,"
For all things gentle, all things beautiful,
I hold, my mother, for a part of thee.
So have I held. All things beautiful, but chiefly flowers. Her feeling
for them was little short of adoration. Her religious mind appeared to
regard them as little voiceless messengers from the Author of our
beings and of Nature, or as divine symbols of a place and a beauty
beyond our power to imagine.
I think it likely that when Dolben penned those lines to the Snowdrop
it was in his mind that this was one of his mother's favourites. My
mother had her favourites too; not the roses and carnations in our
gardens, but mostly among the wild flowers growing on the pampas--
flowers which I never see in England. But I remember them, and if by
some strange chance I should find myself once more in that distant
region, I should go out in search of them, and seeing them again, feel
that I was communing with her spirit.
These memories of my mother are a relief to me in recalling that
melancholy time, the years of my youth that were wasted and worse,
considering their effect and that the very thought of that period,
which is to others the fullest, richest, and happiest in life, has
always been painful to me. Yet to it I am now obliged to return for
the space of two or three pages to relate how I eventually came out of
it.
My case was not precisely like that of Cooper's Castaway, but rather
like that of a fugitive from his ship on some tropical coast who, on
swimming to the shore, finds himself in a mangrove swamp, waist-deep
in mire, tangled in rope-like roots, straining frantically to escape
his doom.
I have told how after my fifteenth anniversary, when I first began to
reflect seriously on my future life, the idea still persisted that my
perpetual delight in Nature was nothing more than a condition or phase
of my child's and boy's mind, and would inevitably fade out in time. I
might have guessed at an earlier date that this was a delusion, since
the feeling had grown in strength with the years, but it was only
after I took to reading at the beginning of my sixteenth year that I
discovered its true character. One of the books I read then for the
first time was White's Selborne, given to me by an old friend of our
family, a merchant in Buenos Ayres, who had been accustomed to stay a
week or two with us once a year when he took his holiday. He had been
on a visit to Europe, and one day, he told me, when in London on the
eve of his departure, he was in a bookshop, and seeing this book on
the counter and glancing at a page or two, it occurred to him that it
was just the right thing to get for that bird-loving boy out on the
pampas. I read and re-read it many times, for nothing so good of its
kind had ever come to me, but it did not reveal to me the secret of my
own feeling for Nature--the feeling of which I was becoming more and
more conscious, which was a mystery to me, especially at certain
moments, when it would come upon me with a sudden rush. So powerful it
was, so unaccountable, I was actually afraid of it, yet I would go out
of my way to seek it. At the hour of sunset I would go out half a mile
or so from the house, and sitting on the dry grass with hands clasped
round my knees, gaze at the western sky, waiting for it to take me.
And I would ask myself: What does it mean? But there was no answer to
that in any book concerning the "life and conversation of animals." I
found it in other works: in Brown's Philosophy--another of the ancient
tomes on our shelves--and in an old volume containing appreciations of
the early nineteenth-century poets; also in other works. They did not
tell me in so many words that it was the mystical faculty in me which
produced those strange rushes or bursts of feeling and lifted me out
of myself at moments; but what I found in their words was sufficient
to show me that the feeling of delight in Nature was an enduring one,
that others had known it, and that it had been a secret source of
happiness throughout their lives.
This revelation, which in other circumstances would have made me
exceedingly happy, only added to my misery when, as it appeared, I had
only a short time to live. Nature could charm, she could enchant me,
and her wordless messages to my soul were to me sweeter than honey and
the honeycomb, but she could not take the sting and victory from
death, and I had perforce to go elsewhere for consolation. Yet even
so, in my worst days, my darkest years, when occupied with the
laborious business of working out my own salvation with fear and
trembling, with that spectre of death always following me, even so I
could not rid my mind of its old passion and delight. The rising and
setting sun, the sight of a lucid blue sky after cloud and rain, the
long unheard familiar call-note of some newly-returned migrant, the
first sight of some flower in spring, would bring back the old emotion
and would be like a sudden ray of sunlight in a dark place--a
momentary intense joy, to be succeeded by ineffable pain. Then there
were times when these two opposite feelings mingled and would be
together in my mind for hours at a time, and this occurred oftenest
during the autumnal migration, when the great wave of bird-life set
northwards, and all through March and April the birds were visible in
flock succeeding flock from dawn to dark, until the summer visitants
were all gone, to be succeeded in May by the birds from the far south,
flying from the Antarctic winter.
This annual spectacle had always been a moving one, but the feeling it
now produced--this mingled feeling--was most powerful on still
moonlight nights, when I would sit or lie on my bed gazing out on the
prospect, earth and sky, in its changed mysterious aspect. And, lying
there, I would listen by the hour to the three-syllable call-note of
the upland or solitary plover, as the birds went past, each bird alone
far up in the dim sky, winging his way to the north. It was a strange
vigil I kept, stirred by strange thoughts and feelings, in that
moonlit earth that was strange too, albeit familiar, for never before
had the sense of the supernatural in Nature been stronger. And the
bird I listened to, that same solitary plover I had known and admired
from my earliest years, the most graceful of birds, beautiful to see
and hear when it would spring up before my horse with its prolonged
wild bubbling cry of alarm and go away with swift, swallow-like
flight--what intensity and gladness of life was in it, what a
wonderful inherited knowledge in its brain, and what an inexhaustible
vigour in its slender frame to enable it to perform that annual double
journey of upwards of ten thousand miles! What a joy it would be to
live for ages in a world of such fascinating phenomena! If some great
physician, wise beyond all others, infallible, had said to me that all
my doctors had been wrong, that, barring accidents, I had yet fifty
years to live, or forty, or even thirty, I should have worshipped him
and would have counted myself the happiest being on the globe, with so
many autumns and winters and springs and summers to see yet.
With these supernatural moonlight nights I finish the story of that
dark time, albeit the darkness had not yet gone; to have recalled it
and related it briefly as I could once in my life is enough. Let me
now go back to the simile of the lost wretch struggling for life in
the mangrove swamp. The first sense of having set my foot on a firmer
place in that slough of fetid slime, of a wholesome breath of air
blown to me from outside the shadow of the black abhorred forest, was
when I began to experience intervals of relief from physical pain,
when these grew more and more frequent and would extend to entire
days, then to weeks, and for a time I would become oblivious of my
precarious state. I was still and for a long time subject to attacks,
when the pain was intolerable and was like steel driven into my heart,
always followed by violent palpitations, which would last for hours.
But I found that exercise on foot or horseback made me no worse, and I
became more and more venturesome, spending most of my time out of
doors, although often troubled with the thought that my passion for
Nature was a hindrance to me, a turning aside from the difficult way I
had been striving to keep.
Then my elder brother returned, an event of the greatest importance in
my life; and as he had not been expected so soon, I was for a minute
in doubt that this strange visitor could be my brother, so greatly had
he altered in appearance in those five long years of absence, which
had seemed like an age to me. He had left us as a smooth-faced youth,
with skin tanned to such a deep colour that with his dark piercing
eyes and long black hair he had looked to me more like an Indian than
a white man. Now his skin was white, and he had grown a brown beard
and moustache. In disposition, too, he had grown more genial and
tolerant, but I soon discovered that in character he had not changed.
As soon as an opportunity came he began to interrogate and cross-
question me as to my mind--life and where I stood, and expressed
himself surprised to hear that I still held to the creed in which we
had been reared. How, he demanded, did I reconcile these ancient
fabulous notions with the doctrine of evolution? What effect had
Darwin produced on me? I had to confess that I had not read a line of
his work, that with the exception of Draper's History of Civilisation,
which had come by chance in my way, I had during all those five years
read nothing but the old books which had always been on our shelves.
He said he knew Draper's History, and it was not the sort of book for
me to read at present. I wanted a different history, with animals as
well as men in it. He had a store of books with him, and would lend me
the Origin of Species to begin with.
When I had read and returned the book, and he was eager to hear my
opinion, I said it had not hurt me in the least, since Darwin had to
my mind only succeeded in disproving his own theory with his argument
from artificial selection. He himself confessed that no new species
had ever been produced in that way.
That, he said in reply, was the easy criticism that any one who came
to the reading in a hostile spirit would make. They would fasten on
that apparently weak point and not pay much attention to the fact that
it is fairly met and answered in the book. When he first read the book
it convinced him; but he had come to it with an open mind and I with a
prejudiced mind on account of my religious ideas. He advised me to
read it again, to read and consider it carefully with the sole purpose
of getting at the truth. "Take it," he said, "and read it again in the
right way for you to read it--as a naturalist."
He had been surprised that I, an ignorant boy or youth on the pampas,
had ventured to criticise such a work. I, on my side, had been equally
surprised at his quiet way of reasoning with me, with none of the old
scornful spirit flaming out. He was gentle with me, knowing that I had
suffered much, and was not free yet.
I read it again in the way he had counselled, and then refused to
think any more on the subject. I was sick of thinking. Like the wretch
who long has tossed upon the thorny bed of pain, I only wanted to
repair my vigour lost and breathe and walk again. To be on horseback,
galloping over the green pampas, in sun and wind. For after all it was
only a reprieve, not a commutation of sentence--though one of a kind
unknown in the Courts, in which the condemned man is allowed out on
bail. My pardon was not received until a few years later. I returned
with a new wonderful zest to my old sports, shooting and fishing, and
would spend days and weeks from home, sometimes staying with old
gaucho friends and former neighbours at their ranches, attending
cattle-markings and partings, dances, and other gatherings, and also
made longer expeditions to the southern and western frontiers of the
province, living out of doors for months at a time.
Despite my determination to put the question off, my mind, or sub-
conscious mind, like a dog with a bone which it refuses to drop in
defiance of its master's command, went on revolving it. It went to bed
and got up with me, and was with me the day long, and whenever I had a
still interval, when I would pull up my horse to sit motionless
watching some creature, bird or beast or snake, or sat on the ground
poring over some insect occupied with the business of its little life,
I would become conscious of the discussion and argument going on. And
every creature I watched, from the great soaring bird circling in the
sky at a vast altitude to the little life at my feet, was brought into
the argument, and was a type, representing a group marked by a family
likeness not only in figure and colouring and language, but in mind as
well, in habits and the most trivial traits and tricks of gesture and
so on; the entire group in its turn related to another group, and to
others, still further and further away, the likeness growing less and
less. What explanation was possible but that of community of descent?
How incredible it appeared that this had not been seen years ago--yes,
even before it was discovered that the world was round and was one of
a system of planets revolving round the sun. All this starry knowledge
was of little or no importance compared to that of our relationship
with all the infinitely various forms of life that share the earth
with us. Yet it was not till the second half of the nineteenth century
that this great, almost self-evident truth had won a hearing in the
world!
No doubt this is a common experience: no sooner has the inquirer been
driven to accept a new doctrine than it takes complete possession of
his mind, and has not then the appearance of a strange and unwelcome
guest, but rather that of a familiar friendly one, and is like a long-
established housemate. I suppose the explanation is that when we throw
open the doors to the new importunate visitor, it is virtually a
ceremony, since the real event has been already accomplished, the
guest having stolen in by some other way and made himself at home in
the sub-conscious mind. Insensibly and inevitably I had become an
evolutionist, albeit never wholly satisfied with natural selection as
the only and sufficient explanation of the change in the forms of
life. And again, insensibly and inevitably, the new doctrine has led
to modifications of the old religious ideas and eventually to a new
and simplified philosophy of life. A good enough one so far as this
life is concerned, but unhappily it takes no account of another, a
second and perdurable life without change of personality.
This subject has been much in men's minds during the past two or three
dreadful years, often reminding me of that shock I received as a boy
of fourteen at the old gaucho's bitter story of his soul; I have also
again been reminded of the theory in which that younger and greatly-
loved brother of mine was able to find comfort. He had become deeply
religious, and after much reading in Herbert Spencer and other modern
philosophers and evolutionists, he told me he thought it was idle for
Christians to fight against the argument of the materialists that the
mind is a function of the brain. Undoubtedly it was that, and our
mental faculties perished with the brain; but we had a soul that was
imperishable as well. _He knew it_, which meant that he too was a
mystic, and being wholly preoccupied with religion, his mystical
faculty found its use and exercise there. At all events, his notion
served to lift him over _his_ difficulties and to get him out of
_his_ mangrove swamp--a way perhaps less impossible than the one
recently pointed out by William James.
Thus I came out of the contest a loser, but as a compensation had the
knowledge that my physicians were false prophets; that, barring
accidents, I could count on thirty, forty, even fifty years with their
summers and autumns and winters. And that was the life I desired--
the life the heart can conceive--the earth life. When I hear people
say they have not found the world and life so agreeable or interesting
as to be in love with it, or that they look with equanimity to its
end, I am apt to think they have never been properly alive nor seen
with clear vision the world they think so meanly of, or anything in
it--not a blade of grass. Only I know that mine is an exceptional
case, that the visible world is to me more beautiful and interesting
than to most persons, that the delight I experienced in my communing
with Nature did not pass away, leaving nothing but a recollection of
vanished happiness to intensify a present pain. The happiness was
never lost, but owing to that faculty I have spoken of, had a
cumulative effect on the mind and was mine again, so that in my worst
times, when I was compelled to exist shut out from Nature in London
for long periods, sick and poor and friendless, I could yet always
feel that it was infinitely better to be than not to be.
THE END