I despair of expressing to you the profound pathos that seemed to me to surround this old despondent creature, with his broken dreams and his regretful memories.  Where was the mistake he made?  I suppose that he over-estimated his powers; but it was a generous mistake after all; and he has had to bear the slow sad disillusionment, the crushing burden of futility.  He set out to win glory, and he is a forgotten, shabby, irresolute figure, subsisting on the charity of wealthy visitors!  And yet he seems to have missed happiness by so little.  To live as he does might be a serene and beautiful thing.  If such a man had large reserves of hope and tenderness and patience; if he could but be content with the tranquil beauty of the wholesome earth, spread so richly before his eyes, it would be a life to be envied.

It has been a gentle lesson to me, that one must resolutely practise one’s heart and spirit for the closing hours.  In the case of successful men, as they grow older, it often strikes me with a sense of pain how passionately they cling to their ambitions and activities.  How many people there are who work too long, and try to prolong the energies of morning into the afternoon, and the toil of afternoon into the peace of evening.  I earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for those who are in the forefront of the race.  And yet if one does not practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to come suddenly and swiftly to one’s call.  There comes a day when a man ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the machine.  There ought to come a patient, beautiful, and kindly dignity, a love of young things and fresh flowers; not an envious and regretful unhappiness at the loss of the eager life and its brisk sensations, which betrays itself too often in a trickle of exaggerated reminiscences, a “weary, day-long chirping.”

This is a harder task, I suppose, for an old bachelor than for a father of children.  I have sometimes felt that adoption, with all its risks, of some young creature that you can call your own, would be a solution for many loveless lives, because it would stir them out of the comfortable selfishness that is the bane of the barren heart.

Of course, a schoolmaster suffers from this less than most professional men; but, even so, it is melancholy to reflect how the boys one has cared for, and tried to help, drift out of one’s sight and ken.  I have no touch of the feeling which they say was characteristic of Jowett—­and indeed is amply evidenced by his correspondence—­that once a man’s tutor he was always his tutor, even though his pupil became grey-headed and a grandfather.  One must do the best for the boys and look for no gratitude; it often comes, indeed, in rich measure, but the schoolmaster who craves for it is lost.