In one letter he wrote to me, I find the following words:  it never occurred to me at the time that they were the gradual fruits of his own experience on the subject: 

“Physical and mental depression is a most fearful enemy.  Other things give you trouble at intervals—­toothache, headache, etc., are all spasmodic afflictions, and, moreover, can be much mitigated by circumstances.  But with depression it is not so:  it poisons any cup—­it turns all the cheerful little daily duties of life into miseries, unutterable burdens; death is the only future event which you can contemplate with satisfaction.  It admits of no comfort:  the whispered suggestion of the mind, ‘You will be better soon,’ falls on deaf ears.  No physical suffering that I have ever felt, and I have not been without my share, is in the least comparable to it; the agony of foreboding remorse and gloom with which it involves past, present, and future—­there is nothing like it.  It is the valley of the Shadow of Death.

“But when one first realizes how purely physical it is, it is an era.  I endured it for two years first:  now I am prepared.  I may even say that though all sense of enjoyment dies under it, my friends, the company I am in, generally suspect nothing.”

This was literally the case.  I knew his spirits were never very high; but he seemed to me to maintain, what is far more valuable, a genial equable flow of cheerfulness, such as one would give much to possess.

Among his occasional diversions at this time, I must place visiting some of the worst houses in one of the worst quarters in London.

It was not then a fashionable habit, and he never spoke of it or made capital out of his experience; but he went to have an acquaintance that should be teres et rotundus with all phases of life.  He never attempted to relieve misery by indiscriminate charity; his principles were strongly against it.

“I don’t profess to understand the economical condemnation of indiscriminate charity.  I don’t see why one set of people should not spend in necessaries what another set would only spend in luxuries.

“But I do understand this:  that it does infinite harm, by accustoming the poor to think that all the help they will get from the upper classes till they rise up themselves and lay hands upon it, will be indiscriminate half-sovereigns.  The clergy are beginning to disabuse them of this idea.  It is a fact which does appeal to them when they see a man that they recognize belongs by right to the ‘high life’ and could drive in his carriage, or at any rate in somebody else’s, and have meat four times a day—­when they see such a man coming and staying among them, certainly not for pleasure or money, or even, for a long time, at least, love, it impresses them far more than the Non-conformists or Revivalists who attempt the same kind of thing.

“And that’s the sort of help I want them to look for—­intelligent sympathy and interest in them.  To most of them no amount of relief or education could do any good now; it would only produce a rank foliage of vice, which is slightly restrained by hard labour and hard food.  Sensualism is a taint in their blood now.