he
kind of quiet that I recommended had any force or weight at all, it
should be the sort of quiet which I still could realise and value in a
life full of engagements and duties and business, and that if it could
be developed on a background of that kind, it might have a worth which
it could not have if it were gently conceived in peaceful days and
untroubled hours.

So it has all been written in spaces of hard-driven work, when the day
never seemed long enough for all I had to do, between interruptions
and interviews and teaching and meetings. But the sight and scent that
I shall always connect with it, is that of a great lilac-bush which
stands just outside my study window, and which day by day in this
bright and chilly spring has held up its purple clusters, overtopping
the dense, rich, pale foliage, against a blue and cloudless sky; and
when the wind has been in the North, as it has often been, has filled
my room with the scent of breaking buds. How often, as I wrote, have I
cast a sidelong look at the lilac-bush! How often has it appeared to
beckon me away from my papers to a freer and more fragrant air
outside! But it seemed to me that I was perhaps obeying the call of
the lilac best--though how far away from its freshness and
sweetness!--if I tried to make my own busy life, which I do not
pretend not to enjoy, break into such flower as it could, and give out
what the old books call its 'spicery,' such as it is.

Because the bloom, the colour, the scent, are all there, if I could
but express them. That is the truth! I do not claim to make them, to
cause them, to create them, any more than the lilac could engender the
scent of roses or of violets. Nor do I profess to do faithfully all
that I say in my book that it is well to do. That is the worst, and
yet perhaps it is the best, of books, that one presents in them one's
hopes, dreams, desires, visions; more than one's dull and mean
performances. 'Als ich kann!' That is the best one can do and say.

It is our own fault, and not the fault of our visions, that we cannot
always say what we think in talk, even to our best friends. We begin
to do so, perhaps, and we see a shadow gather. Either the friend does
not understand, or he does not care, or he thinks it all unreal and
affected; and then there falls on us a foolish shyness, and we become
not what we are, but what we think the friend would like to think us;
and so he 'gets to know' as he calls it, not what is re