...It is as if all that old life at Holmwood had merely been a preparation for the real life of our love—­as if we were then children ignorant of life’s real purpose—­as if these last months had merely been my old doubts over again, whether I had rightly or wrongly interpreted the manner and the words that had given me hope...

We will begin the new love of woman and man, no longer that of boy and girl, conscious that we have aims and purposes as well as affections, and that if love is sweet life is dreadfully stern and earnest.

[As time went on and no permanency offered—­although a good deal of writing fell in his way—­the strain told heavily upon him.  In the autumn he was quite out of sorts, body and mind, more at war with himself than he ever was in his life before.  All this, he writes, had darkened his thoughts, had made him once more imagine a hopeless discrepancy between the two of them in their ways of thinking and objects in life.  It was not till November 1853 that this depression was banished by the trust and confidence of her last letter.] “I wish to Heaven,” [he writes,] “it had reached me six months ago.  It would have saved me a world of pain and error.” [But with this, the worst period of mental suffering was over, and every haunting doubt was finally exorcised.  His career was made possible by the steady faith which neither separation nor any misgiving nor its own troubles could shake.  And from this point all things began to brighten.  His health had been restored by a trip to the Pyrenees with his brother George in September.  He had got work that enabled him to regard the Admiralty and its menaces with complete equanimity; a “Manual of Comparative Anatomy,” for Churchhill the publisher, regular work on the “Westminster,” and another book in prospect,] “so that if I quit the Service to-morrow, these will give me more than my pay has been.” [(This regular work was the article on Contemporary Science, which in October 1854 he got Tyndall to share with him.  For, he writes,] “To give some account of the books in one’s own department is no particular trouble, and comes with me under the head of being paid for what I must, in any case, do—­but I neither will, nor can, go on writing about books in other departments, of which I am not competent to form a judgment even if I had the time to give to them.”) [And on December 7 he writes how he has been restored and revived by reading over her last two letters, and confesses,] “I have been unjust to the depth and strength of your devotion, but will never do so again.” [Then he tells all he had gone through before leaving England in September for his holiday—­how he had resolved to abandon all his special pursuits and take up Chemistry, for practical purposes, when first one publisher and then another asked him to write for them, and hopes were held out to him of being appointed to deliver the Fullerian lectures at the Royal Institution for the next three years; while,