with love and care. And in the midst of it all I sit, in dry misery,
hating myself for my feebleness and cowardice, keeping as far as
possible my pain to myself, brooding, feverishly straining, struggling
hopelessly to recover the clue. The savour has gone out of life; I feel
widowed, frozen, desolate. How often have I tranquilly and
good-humouredly contemplated the time when I need write no more, when
my work should be done, when I should have said all I had to say, and
could take life as it came, soberly and wisely. Now that the end has
come of itself, I feel like a hopeless prisoner, with death the only
escape from a bitter and disconsolate solitude.

Can I not amuse myself with books, pictures, talk? No, because it is
all a purposeless passing of dreary hours. Before, there was always an
object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and all the
pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to beguile the
plodding path. Now I am adrift; I need go neither forwards nor
backwards; and the things which before were gentle and quiet
occupations have become duties to be drearily fulfilled.

I have put down here exactly what I feel. It is not cowardice that
makes me do it, but a desire to face the situation, exactly as it is.
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit! And in any case nothing can be
done by blinking the truth. I shall need all my courage and all my
resolution to meet it, and I shall meet it as manfully as I can. Yet
the thought of meeting it thus has no inspiration in it. My only desire
is that the frozen mind may melt at the touch of some genial ray, and
that the buds may prick and unfold upon the shrunken bough.

January 15, 1889.

One of the miseries of my present situation is that it is all so
intangible, and to the outsider so incomprehensible. There is no
particular reason why I should write. I do not need the money; I
believe I do not desire fame. Let me try to be perfectly frank about
this; I do not at all desire the tangible results of fame, invitations
to banquets, requests to deliver lectures, the acquaintance of notable
people, laudatory reviews. I like a quiet life; I do not want monstrari
digito, as Horace says. I have had a taste of all of these things, and
they do not amuse me, though I confess that I thought they would. I
feel in this rather as Tennyson felt--that I dislike contemptuous
criticism, and do not value praise--except the praise of a very few,
the masters of t