rer the truth
when he said that "a sorrow's crown of sorrow was remembering happier
things."

February 3, 1889.

To amuse oneself--that is the difficulty. Amusements are or ought to be
the childish, irrational, savage things which a man goes on doing and
practising, in virtue, I suppose, of the noble privilege of reason, far
longer than any other animal--only YOUNG animals amuse themselves; a
dog perhaps retains the faculty longer than most animals, but he only
does it out of sympathy and companionship, to amuse his inscrutable
owner, not to amuse himself. Amusements ought to be things which one
wants to do, and which one is slightly ashamed of doing--enough
ashamed, I mean, to give rather elaborate reasons for continuing them.
If one shoots, for instance, one ought to say that it gets one out of
doors, and that what one really enjoys is the country, and so forth.
Personally I was never much amused by amusements, and gave them up as
soon as I decently could. I regret it now. I wish we were all taught a
handicraft as a regular part of education! I used to sketch, and strum
a piano once, but I cannot deliberately set to work on such things
again. I gave them all up when I became a writer, really, I suppose,
because I did not care for them, but nominally on the grounds of
"resolute limitation," as Lord Acton said--with the idea that if you
prune off the otiose boughs of a tree, you throw the strength of the
sap into the boughs you retain. I see now that it was a mistake. But it
is too late to begin again now; I was reading Kingsley's Life the other
day. He used to overwork himself periodically--use up the grey matter
at the base of his brain, as he described it; but he had a hundred
things that he wanted to do besides writing--fishing, entomologising,
botanising. Browning liked modelling in clay, Wordsworth liked long
walks, Byron had enough to do to keep himself thin, Tennyson had his
pipe, Morris made tapestry at a loom. Southey had no amusements, and he
died of softening of the brain. The happy people are those who have
work which they love, and a hobby of a totally different kind which
they love even better. But I doubt whether one can make a hobby for
oneself in middle age, unless one is a very resolute person indeed.

February 7, 1889.

The children went off yesterday to spend the inside of the day with a
parson hard by, who has three children of his own, about the same age.
They did not want to go, of c