ish, of denial to
every desire that rose in me, in which there was a bar laid upon every
impulse, and an immovable chain upon every tendency. I was ambitious,
and I could get no recognition. I was gifted, at least in my own
estimation, and I could force open no field for my gifts. I was in
love, and there was no means of attaining its object. Patience!
patience! This was what I had been saying to myself hour by hour for
two years, but there were times when it seemed that my brain, my whole
system, was collapsing in the nervous irritation, in the chafing and
the straining of this existence, which was filled with nothing but
successless work, continuous disappointment, and unsatisfied desires.

Night succeeded night in which sleep was an impossibility, when my head
seemed light and turning as in delirium with the violence and intensity
of longing to shape my life differently. Could I have obtained the
fulfilment of one desire or of the other, the strength of my nature
would have flowed naturally into the channel opened before it. Could I
have seen my work succeeding I would have foregone everything else
willingly and worked with satisfied ardour, closing my eyes to the
pleasure of life. Could I have obtained Lucia I would have been content
to work and wait patiently till success chose to come to me. But the
latter desire depended on the former, and when I thought of Lucia, her
image only brought back upon me the stunning, deadening sense of the
necessity of success, and so my thoughts were dragged round in a
perpetual, wearying, dizzying circle, like a fixed wheel revolving
without motion forward.

I had grown to hate my present daily existence. It was a state of
enforced passive inaction that seemed corroding my nerves as the long
worn fetter eats into the flesh. The current of life was running at its
swiftest and fiercest in my veins. Vitality was ardent in the brain and
blood, but there was no worthy expense of my energies, and they simply
fell back upon themselves again and again, thwarted, baffled, unused,
until existence seemed an intolerable curse. I saw daily other men's
works accepted and received, and their talent and genius praised that
could produce such a work, which, when it drifted into my hands, I
recognised was no better than the MSS. lying in my study, unused,
wasted. Sometimes the morning of a day would pass in looking through
the reviews and criticisms of the favourite novel of the hour, the
afternoo