Then, as we sped homewards in the speeding train, there came over me another thought.  Here was I, who had lightly trafficked with human emotions, who had written with a romantic glow of the dark things of life, despair, agony, thoughts of self-destruction, insane fears, here was I at last confronted with them.  I could never dare, I felt, to speak of such things again; were such dark mysteries to be used to heighten the sense of security and joy, to give a trivial reader a thrill of pleasure, a sympathetic reader a thrill of luxurious emotion?  No, there was nothing uplifting or romantic about them when they came; they were dark as the grave, cold as the underlying clay.  What a vile and loathsome profanation, deserving indeed of a grim punishment, to make a picturesque background out of such things!  At length I had had my bitter taste of grief, and drew in to my trembling spirit the shuddering chill of despair.  I had stepped, like the light-hearted maiden of the old story, within the forbidden door, and the ugly, the ghastly reality of the place had burst upon me, the huddled bodies, the basin filled with blood.  One had read in books of men and women whose life had been suddenly curdled into slow miseries.  One had half blamed them in one’s thought; one had felt that any experience, however dark and deep, must have its artistic value; and one had thought that they should have emerged with new zest into life.  I understood it now, how life could be frozen at its very source, how one could cry out with Job curses on the day that gave one birth, and how gladly one would turn one’s face away from the world and all its cheerful noise, awaiting the last stroke of God.

February 20, 1889.

There is a story of a Cornish farmer who, returning home one dark and misty night, struck across the moorland, every yard of which he knew, in order to avoid a long tramp by road.  In one place there were a number of disused mine-shafts; the railing which had once protected them had rotted away, and it had been no one’s business to see that it was renewed—­some few had been filled up, but many of them were hundreds of feet deep, and entirely unguarded.  The farmer first missed the track, and after long wandering found himself at last among the shafts.  He sate down, knowing the extreme danger of his situation, and resolved to wait till the morning; but it became so cold that he dared stay no longer, for fear of being frozen alive, and with infinite precautions he tried to make his way out of the dangerous region, following the downward slope of the ground.  In spite, however, of all his care, he found suddenly, on putting his foot down, that he was on the edge of a shaft, and that his foot was dangling in vacancy.  He threw himself backwards, but too late, and he slid down several feet, grasping at the grass and heather; his foot fortunately struck against a large stone, which though precariously poised, arrested his fall; and he hung there for some hours in mortal anguish, not