men and women troubled by no misgivings, with no certain aim, just doing whatever the tide of life impels them to do.  My neighbour here is a man who for years has gone up to town every day to his office.  He is perfectly contented, absolutely happy.  He has made more money than he will ever need or spend, and he will leave his children a considerable fortune.  He is kind, respectable, upright; he is considered a thoroughly enviable man, and indeed, if prosperity and contentment are the sign and seal of God’s approbation, such a man is the highest work of God, and has every reason to be an optimist.  He would think my questionings morbid and my desires moonshine.  He is not necessarily right any more than I; but his theory of life works out a good deal better for him than mine for me.

Well, we drift, we drift!  Sometimes the sun shines bright on the wave, and the wheeling birds dip and hover, and our heart is full of song.  But sometimes we plunge on rising billows, with the wind wailing, and the rain pricking the surface with needle-points; we are weary and uncomforted; and we do not know why we suffer, or why we are glad.  Sometimes I have a far-off hope that I shall know, that I shall understand and be satisfied; but sometimes, alas, I fear that my soul will flare out upon the darkness, and know no more either of weal or woe.

March 20, 1889.

I am reading a great deal now; but I find that I turn naturally to books of a sad intimite—­books in which are revealed the sorrowful cares and troubles of sensitive people.  Partly, I suppose, it is to get the sense of comfort which comes from feeling that others have suffered too; but partly to find, if I can, some medicine for my soul, in learning how others struggled out of the mire.  Thus I have been reading Froude’s Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle’s Letters over again, and they have moved me strangely and deeply.  Perhaps it is mostly that I have felt, in these dark months, drawn to the society of two brave people—­she was brave in her silences, he in the way in which he stuck doggedly to his work—­who each suffered so horribly, so imaginatively, so inexplicably, and, alas, it would seem, so unnecessarily!  Of course Carlyle indulged his moods, while Mrs. Carlyle fought against hers; moreover, he had the instinct for translating thoughts, instantaneously and volubly, into vehement picturesque speech.  How he could bite in a picture, an ugly, ill-tempered one enough very often, as when he called Coleridge a “weltering” man!  Many of his sketches are mere Gillray caricatures of people, seen through bile unutterable, exasperated by nervous irritability.  And Mrs. Carlyle had a mordant wit enough.  But still both of them had au fond a deep need of love, and a power of lavishing love.  It comes out in the old man’s whimsical notes and prefaces; and indeed it is true to say that if a person once actually penetrated into Carlyle’s inner circle, he found himself loved hungrily and