generously and whole-heartedly approve. it seems now, looking back upon it, that it was all impossibly happy and delightful, too good to be true.  Yet I have everything that I had, except my unhappy writing; and the want of it poisons life.  I no longer seem to lie pleasantly in ambush for pretty traits of character, humorous situations, delicate nuances of talk.  I look blankly at garden, field, and wood, because I cannot draw from them the setting that I want.  Even my close and intimate companionship with Maud seems to have suffered, for I was like a child, bringing the little wonders that it finds by the hedgerow to be looked at by a loving eye.  Maud is angelically tender, kind, sweet.  She tells me only to wait; she draws me on to talk; she surrounds me with love and care.  And in the midst of it all I sit, in dry misery, hating myself for my feebleness and cowardice, keeping as far as possible my pain to myself, brooding, feverishly straining, struggling hopelessly to recover the clue.  The savour has gone out of life; I feel widowed, frozen, desolate.  How often have I tranquilly and good-humouredly contemplated the time when I need write no more, when my work should be done, when I should have said all I had to say, and could take life as it came, soberly and wisely.  Now that the end has come of itself, I feel like a hopeless prisoner, with death the only escape from a bitter and disconsolate solitude.

Can I not amuse myself with books, pictures, talk?  No, because it is all a purposeless passing of dreary hours.  Before, there was always an object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and all the pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to beguile the plodding path.  Now I am adrift; I need go neither forwards nor backwards; and the things which before were gentle and quiet occupations have become duties to be drearily fulfilled.

I have put down here exactly what I feel.  It is not cowardice that makes me do it, but a desire to face the situation, exactly as it is.  Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit!  And in any case nothing can be done by blinking the truth.  I shall need all my courage and all my resolution to meet it, and I shall meet it as manfully as I can.  Yet the thought of meeting it thus has no inspiration in it.  My only desire is that the frozen mind may melt at the touch of some genial ray, and that the buds may prick and unfold upon the shrunken bough.

January 15, 1889.

One of the miseries of my present situation is that it is all so intangible, and to the outsider so incomprehensible.  There is no particular reason why I should write.  I do not need the money; I believe I do not desire fame.  Let me try to be perfectly frank about this; I do not at all desire the tangible results of fame, invitations to banquets, requests to deliver lectures, the acquaintance of notable people, laudatory reviews.  I like a quiet life; I do not want monstrari digito, as Horace says.  I have had a taste of