smallest difficulty about expressing exactly as I wish to express it, whatever is in my mind.  When I fail, it is because the thought itself is incomplete, imperfect, obscure; yet as I write, weariness and dissatisfaction are unknown.  I cannot imagine how anyone can write a book without loving the toil, such as it is.  Probably that is because I am indolent or pleasure-loving.  I do not see how work of this kind can be done at all in a spirit of heaviness, it may be a fine moral discipline to do a dreaded thing heavily and faithfully; but what hope is there of the work being tinged with delight?  It is as though a tired man set out to make a butterfly out of cardboard and gum and powdered silks; it would be nothing when it was made.  A book must, before all things, have vigour; and vigour cannot be germinated by a sense of duty; it can only spring from hope and confidence and desire.

But now, to-day, my darling has gone from me; he is jolting in some dusty van, or he is propelled through muddy streets in a red box on wheels; or perhaps he is already in the factory among the rattle of type and the throb of the printing-press.  I feel like a father whose boy has gone to school, and who sits wondering how the child may be faring in the big, unfamiliar place.  Well, I will not grieve; but rather I will thank the Father of all things living, the inspirer of all sweet and delicate thoughts, all pleasant fancies, all glowing words, for the joy that I have had.

XV

In one respect only does the advance of age cast a shadow over my mind; in most matters it is a pure gain.  Even though a certain peculiar quality of light-hearted happiness visits me more rarely—­a happiness like that of a lark that soars, beats her wings, and trills in the blue sky—­yet the loss is more than compensated for by the growth of an equable tranquillity, neither rapturous nor sad, which abides with me for long spaces.

But here is the secret wound—­clausum pectore volnus!—­I am or would be an artist in words.  Well, when I look round at the work of the artists whose quality I envy and adore, I am struck by this alarming fact, that in almost every case their earliest work is their best work.

This is almost invariably true in one particular domain, that of purely imaginative poetical work.  By which I do not mean poetry only, but poetical prose like Pater’s, poetical fiction like Charlotte Bronte’s; I think that a narrative writer, a humorous writer, a critical writer, a biographical writer may continue to improve until his faculties begin to decay.  He may get a wider, a more penetrating, a more tolerant view of life; his style gain lucidity, impressiveness, incisiveness, pungency; but in the case of the poetical and the reflective writer it seems to me that something evaporates—­some quite peculiar freshness, naivete, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured.  Take a few typical