A few days ago an old friend came to see me; and I was so futile, so fractious, so dull, so melancholy with him that I wrote to him afterwards to apologise for my condition, telling him that I knew that I was not myself, and hoped he would forgive me for not making more of an effort.  To-day I have had one of the manliest, tenderest, most beautiful letters I have ever had in my life.  He says, “Of course I saw that you were not in your usual mood, but if you had pretended to be, if you had kept me at arm’s length, if you had grimaced and made pretence, we should have been no nearer in spirit.  I was proud and grateful that you should so have trusted me, as to let me see into your heart and mind; and you must believe me when I say that I never loved and honoured you more.  I understood fully what a deep and insupportable trial your present state of mind must be; and I will be frank—­why should I not be?—­ and say that I thought you were bearing it bravely, and what is better still, simply and naturally.  I seemed to come closer to you in those hours than I have ever done before, and to realise better what you were.  ‘To make oneself beloved,’ says an old writer, ’is to make oneself useful to others’—­and you helped me perhaps most, when you knew it least yourself.  I won’t tell you not to brood upon or exaggerate your trouble—­you know that well enough yourself.  But believe me that such times are indeed times of growth and expansion, even when one seems most beaten back upon oneself, most futile, most unmanly.  So take a little comfort, my old friend, and fare onwards hopefully.”

That is a very beautiful and wise letter, and I cannot say how much it has meant for me.  It is a letter that forges an invisible chain, which is yet stronger than the strongest tie that circumstance can forge; it is a lantern for one’s feet, and one treads a little more firmly in the dark path, where the hillside looms formless through the shade.

March 3, 1889.

Best of all the psalms I love the Hundred-and-nineteenth; yet as a child what a weary thing I thought it.  It was long, it was monotonous; it dwelt with a tiresome persistency, I used to think, upon dull things—­laws, commandments, statutes.  Now that I am older, it seems to me one of the most human of all documents.  It is tender, pensive, personal; other psalms are that; but Psalm cxix. is intime and autobiographical.  One is brought very close to a human spirit; one hears his prayers, his sighs, the dropping of his tears.  Then, too, in spite of its sadness, there is a deep hopefulness and faithfulness about it, a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of what is good and true, a certainty that what is pure and beautiful is worth holding on to, whatever may happen; a nearness to God, a quiet confidence in Him.  It is all in a subdued and minor key, but swelling up at intervals into a chord of ravishing sweetness.