and prodigious complexity of life and law counted for less to me than the touch of weariness that hung, after my long vigil, over limbs and brain.  The faculty, the godlike power of knowing and imagining, all actually less to me than my own tiny and fragile sensations.  Such moods as these are strange things, because they bring with them so intense a desire to know, to perceive, and yet paralyse one with the horror of the darkness in which one moves.  One cannot conceive why it is that one is given the power of realising the multiplicity of creation, and yet at the same time left so wholly ignorant of its significance.  One longs to leap into the arms of God, to catch some whisper of His voice; and at the same time there falls the shadow of the prison-house; one is driven relentlessly back upon the old limited life, the duties, the labours, the round of meals and sleep, the tiny relations with others as ignorant as ourselves, and, still worse, with the petty spirits who have a complacent explanation of it all.  Even over love itself the shadow falls.  I am as near to my own dear and true Maud as it is possible to be; but I can tell her nothing of the mystery, and she can tell me nothing.  We are allowed for a time to draw close to each other, to whisper to each other our hopes and fears; but at any moment we can be separated.  The children, Alec and Maggie, dearer to me—­I can say it honestly—­than life itself, to whom we have given being, whose voices I hear as I write, what of them?  They are each of them alone, though they hardly know it yet.  The little unnamed son, who opened his eyes upon the world six years ago, to close them in a few hours, where and what is he now?  Is he somewhere, anywhere?  Does he know of the joy and sorrow he has brought into our lives?  I would fain believe it . . . these are profitless thoughts, of one staring into the abyss.  Somehow these bright weeks have been to me a dreary time.  I am well in health; nothing ails me.  It is six months since my last book was published, and I have taken a deliberate holiday; but always before, my mind, the strain of a book once taken off it, has begun to sprout and burgeon with new ideas and schemes:  but now, for the first time in my life, my mind and heart remain bare and arid.  I seem to have drifted into a dreary silence.  It is not that things have been less beautiful, but beauty seems to have had no message, no significance for me.  The people that I have seen have come and gone like ghosts and puppets.  I have had no curiosity about them, their occupations and thoughts, their hopes and lives; it has not seemed worth while to be interested, in a life which appears so short, and which leads nowhere.  It seems morbid to write thus, but I have not been either morbid or depressed.  It has been an easy life, the life of the last few months, without effort or dissatisfaction, but without zest.  It is a mental tiredness, I suppose.  I have written myself out, and the cistern must fill