for myself, I know that I work and think and hope and fear too much, and that in my restless pursuit of a hundred aims and ambitions and dreams and fancies, I am constantly in danger of hardly living at all, but of simply racing on, like a man intoxicated with affairs, without leisure for strolling, for sitting, for talking, for watching the sky and the earth, smelling the scents of flowers, noting the funny ways of animals, playing with children, eating and drinking.  Yet this is our true heritage, and this is what it means to be a man; and, after all, one has (for all one knows) but a single life, and that a short one.  It is at such moments as these that I wake as from a dream, and think how fast my life flows on, and how very little conscious of its essence I am.  My head is full from morning to night of everything except living.  For a busy man this is, of course, to a certain extent inevitable.  But where I am at fault is in not relapsing at intervals into a wise and patient passivity, and sitting serenely on the shore of the sea of life, playing with pebbles, seeing the waves fall and the ships go by, and wondering at the strange things cast up by the waves, and the sharp briny savours of the air.  Why do I not do this?  Because, to continue my confession, it bores me.  I must, it seems, be always in a fuss; be always hauling myself painfully on to some petty ambition or some shadowy object that I have in view; and the moment I have reached it, I must fix upon another, and begin the process over again.  It is this lust for doing something tangible, for sitting down quickly and writing fifty, for having some definite result to show, which is the ruin of me and many others.  After all, when it is done, what worth has it?  I am not a particularly successful man, and I can’t delude myself into thinking that my work has any very supreme value.  And meanwhile all the real experiences of life pass me by.  I have never, God forgive me, had time to be in love!  That is a pitiful confession.

Sometimes one comes across a person with none of these uneasy ambitions, with whom living is a fine art; then one realises what a much more beautiful creation it is than books and pictures.  It is a kind of sweet and solemn music.  Such a man or woman has time to read, to talk, to write letters, to pay calls, to walk about the farm, to go and sit with tiresome people, to spend long hours with children, to sit in the open air, to keep poultry, to talk to servants, to go to church, to remember what his or her relations are doing, to enjoy garden parties and balls, to like to see young people enjoying themselves, to hear confessions, to do other people’s business, to be a welcome presence everywhere, and to leave a fragrant memory, watered with sweet tears.  That is to live.  And such lives, one is tempted to think, were more possible, more numerous, a hundred years ago.  But now one expects too much, and depends too much on exciting pleasures, whether of work or play.  Well, my three persons in a garden must be a lesson to me; and, whatever may really happen to them, in my mind they shall walk for ever between the apple-trees and the daffodils, looking lovingly at each other, while the elder man shall smile as he reads in the Chronicle of Heaven, which does not grow old.—­Ever yours,