er all that, and that is, the
end which alters everything."

It will not seem to most people that there was anything here which in
happier circumstances might not have been susceptible of considerate
adjustment; but all the circumstances were unfavourable, and the
moderate middle course which the admissions in that letter might wisely
have prompted and wholly justified, was unfortunately not taken. Compare
what before was said of his temperament, with what is there said by
himself of its defects, and the explanation will not be difficult. Every
counteracting influence against the one idea which now predominated over
him had been so weakened as to be almost powerless. His elder children
were no longer children; his books had lost for the time the importance
they formerly had over every other consideration in his life; and he had
not in himself the resource that such a man, judging him from the
surface, might be expected to have had. Not his genius only, but his
whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and with, the
real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against
failure in the realities around him. There was for him no "city of the
mind" against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter. It was in
and from the actual he still stretched forward to find the freedom and
satisfactions of an ideal, and by his very attempts to escape the world
he was driven back into the thick of it. But what he would have sought
there, it supplies to none; and to get the infinite out of anything so
finite, has broken many a stout heart.

At the close of that last letter from Gadshill (5th of September) was
this question--"What do you think of my paying for this place, by
reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. I am very
strongly tempted. Think of it." The reasons against it had great force,
and took, in my judgment, greater from the time at which it was again
proposed. The old ground of opposition remained. It was a substitution
of lower for higher aims; a change to commonplace from more elevated
pursuits; and it had so much of the character of a public exhibition for
money as to raise, in the question of respect for his calling as a
writer, a question also of respect for himself as a gentleman. This
opinion, now strongly reiterated, was referred ultimately to two
distinguished ladies of his acquaintance, who decided against it.[214]
Yet not without such momentary misgiving in the dir