gazing into the final chasm of things, in mute dialogue with “Death, Judgment, and Eternity” (dialogue mute on both sides!), not caring to discourse with poor articulate-speaking fellow creatures on their sorts of topics.  It is right of me; and yet also it is not right.  I often feel that I had better be dead than thus indifferent, contemptuous, disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no thought farther of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against.  But the truth is, I was nearly killed by that hideous Book on Friedrich,—­twelve years in continuous wrestle with the nightmares and the subterranean hydras;—­nearly killed, and had often thought I should be altogether, and must die leaving the monster not so much as finished!  This is one truth, not so evident to any friend or onlooker as it is to myself:  and then there is another, known to myself alone, as it were; and of which I am best not to speak to others, or to speak to them no farther.  By the calamity of April last, I lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a home for me any more.  Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; and I am forever poor without her.  She was snatched from me in a moment,—­as by a death from the gods.  Very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to those who understand it) had all her life been quid plura? I should be among the dullest and stupidest, if I were not among the saddest of all men.  But not a word more on all this.

All summer last, my one solacement in the form of work was writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without return.  Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of worship; the only devout time I had had for a great while past.  These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the way before I myself die:—­but such continues still mainly my employment,—­so many hours every forenoon; what I call the “work” of my day;—­to me, if to no other, it is useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before.  To set about writing my own Life would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done.  The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me?  Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of Eternity swallow me; for my share of it, that, verily, is the handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with the canaille of mankind extant and to come.  “Immortal glory,” is not that a beautiful thing, in the Shakespeare Clubs