Those pleasant days have a savour of their own for this one reason—­that they were not spent in a mere drifting indolence or a luxurious abandonment.  They were deliberately planned, intently lived, carefully employed; behind the pleasures lay a great tract of solid work, very diligently pursued.  That was to have been the backbone of the whole; and it is for this that I have no sense of regret or contrition about it.  It was an experiment; and if in one sense it failed, because it did not take account of energies and elements unused, in another sense it succeeded, because one cannot learn things in this world by hearsay, but only by burning one’s fingers in what seemed so comfortable a flame.  It was done, too, on the right lines, with the desire not to be dependent upon diversion and stir and business, but to approach life simply and directly, practising for the days of loneliness and decline; and this was the error, that it tried to mould life too much, to select from its material, to reject its dross and debris, to rifle rather than to earn the treasure, to limit hopes, to dip the wings of inconvenient desires.

But it is difficult, without experiment, to realise the strain of living life too much in one mood and in one key.  Neither is it the sign of a healthy appetite to be particular about one’s food.  This I freely admit.  I came to see that, trained as I had been in certain habits of life and work, habituated to certain experiences, the savour of the interludes had owed their pungency to their economy and rarity.

And so, like some weft of opalescent mist, the sweet mirage melted in the noonday.  What I then saw I will leave to be told hereafter; but it was not what I desired nor what I expected.

What, then, remains of the time of plenty?  Not, I am thankful to say, either vanity or vexation of spirit.  It was what remains to the ruffled bird, as he shivers in the leafless tree, in which he had sung so loud in the high summer, embowered in greenness and rustling leafage.  No sense of the hollowness or sadness of life; but rather a quickened knowledge of its delight and its intensity.  It is the same feeling that one has when one speeds swiftly in a train near to some place where one lived long ago, and sees glimpses of familiar woods and roads and houses.  One knows well that others are living and working, sauntering and dreaming, in the rooms, the gardens, the paths where one’s own energies once ran so swiftly; yet the old life seems to be there all the time, hidden away behind the woods and walls, if one could but find it!  But I no more wish my experience away, or wish it otherwise, than I wish I had never loved one who is gone from me, or that I had never heard a strain of sweet music, because it has died upon the air.  Because I did not find what I was in search of, or only found a shadow of it, I do not believe that it is not there—­the wheat-flour and the honey are in the hand of God.  I should have tasted them if I had but walked in His way!  Nay, I did taste them; and when He gives me grace to hearken, I shall be fed and satisfied._