and wait. One tends to think, at
such times, that no one has ever passed through a similar experience
before; and the isolation in which one moves is the hardest part of it
all. Alone, and cut off even from God! If one felt that one was
learning something, gaining power or courage, one could bear it
cheerfully; but I feel rather as though all my vitality and moral
strength was being pressed and drained from me. Yet I do not desire
death and silence. I rather crave for life and light.

No, I am not describing my state fairly. At times I have a sense that
something, some power, some great influence, is trying to communicate
with me, to deliver me some message. There are many hours when it is
not so, when my nerveless brain seems losing its hold, slipping off
into some dark confusion of sense. Yet again there are other moments,
when sights and sounds have an overpowering and awful significance;
when the gleams of some tremendous secret seemed flashed upon my mind,
at the sight of the mist-hung valley with its leafless woods and level
water-meadows; the flaring pomp of sunset hung low in the west over the
bare ploughland or the wide-watered plain; the wailing of the wind
round the firelit house; the faint twitter of awakening birds in the
ivy; the voice and smile of my children; the music breaking the silence
of the house at evening. In a moment the sensation comes over me, that
the sound or sight is sent not vaguely or lightly, but deliberately
shown to me, for some great purpose, if I could but divine it; an
oracle of God, if I could but catch the words He utters in the darkness
and the silence.

February 1, 1889.

My dissatisfaction and depression begin to tell on me. I grow nervous
and strained; I am often sleepless, or my sleep is filled by vivid,
horrible, intolerable dreams. I wake early in the clutch of fear. I
wrestle at times with intolerable irritability; social gatherings
become unbearable; I have all sorts of unmanning sensations,
dizzinesses, tremors; I have that dreadful sensation that my
consciousness of things and people around me is slipping away from me,
and that only by a strong effort can one retain one's hold upon them. I
fall into a sort of dull reverie, and come back to the real world with
a shock of surprise and almost horror. I went the other day to consult
a great doctor about this. He reassured me; he laughed at my fears; he
told me that it was a kind of neurasthenia, not fanciful but real