that life is worth living to the uttermost, and that it can all be beautiful and lofty and gracious; but the way to miss it, to lose that fine sense, is to have some dull and definite design of one’s own, which makes one treat all the hours in which one cannot pursue it, but as the dirt and debris of a quarry.  One must not, I see, wait for the golden moments of life, because there are no moments that are not golden, if one can but pierce into their essence.  Yet how is one to realise this, to put it into practice?  I have of late, in my vacuous mood, fallen into the dark error of thinking of the weary hours as of things that must be just lived through, and endured, and beguiled, if possible, until the fire again fall.  But life is a larger and a nobler business than that; and one learns the lesson sooner, if one takes the suffering home to one’s soul, not as a tedious interlude, but as the very melody and march of life itself, even though it crash into discords, or falter in a sombre monotony.

The point is that when one seems to be playing a part to one’s own satisfaction, when one appears to oneself to be brilliant, suggestive, inspiriting, and genial, one is not necessarily ministering to other people; while, on the other hand, when one is dull, troubled, and anxious, out of heart and discontented, one may have the chance of making others happier.  Here is a whimsical instance; in one of my dreariest days—­I was in London on business—­ I sate next to an old friend, generally a very lively, brisk, and cheerful man, who appeared to me strangely silent and depressed.  I led him on to talk freely, and he told me a long tale of anxieties and cares; his health was unsatisfactory, his plans promised ill.  In trying to paint a brighter picture, to reassure and encourage him, I not only forgot my own troubles, but put some hope into him.  We had met, two tired and dispirited men, we went away cheered and encouraged, aware that we were not each of us the only sufferer in the world and that there were possibilities still ahead of us all, nay, in our grip, if we only were not blind and forgetful.

May 8, 1889.

I saw the other day a great artist working on a picture in its initial stages.  There were a few lines of a design roughly traced, and there was a little picture beside him, where the scheme was roughly worked out; but the design itself was covered with strange wild smears of flaring, furious colour, flung crudely upon the canvas.  “I find it impossible to believe,” I said,—­“forgive me for speaking thus—­that these ragged stains and splashes of colour can ever be subdued and harmonised and co-ordinated.”  The great man smiled.  “What would you have said, I wonder,” he replied, “if you had seen, as I did once, a picture of Rossetti’s in an early stage, with the face and arms of one of his strange and mysterious figures roughly painted in in the brightest ultramarine?  Many of these fantastic scraps of colour will disappear altogether from the eye, just lending tone to something which is to be superimposed upon them.”