spairing groans?
Do not such things wound the heart of God? And if a man can be brave
and patient, and trust Him utterly, and bid others trust Him, is He not
thereby consoled?

In these dark months, in which I have suffered much, there rises at
times in my heart a strong intuition that it is not for nothing that I
suffer. I cannot divine whom it is to benefit, or how it is to benefit
any one. One thing indeed saddens me, and that is to reflect that I
have often allowed the record of old sadnesses to heighten my own sense
of luxurious tranquillity and security. Not so will I err again. I will
rather believe that a mighty price is being paid for a mightier joy,
that we are not astray in the wilderness out of the way, but that we
are rather a great and loving company, guided onward to some far-off
city of God, with infinite tenderness, and a love so great that we
cannot even comprehend its depth and its intensity.

I sit, as I write, in my quiet room, the fragrant evening air floating
in, surrounded by all the beloved familiar things that have made my
life sweet, easy, and delightful--books and pictures, that have brought
me so many messages of beauty. I hear the voice of Maud overhead--she
is telling the children a story, and I hear their voices break out
every now and then into eager questions. Yet in the midst of all this
peace and sweetness, I walk in loneliness and gloom, hardly daring, so
faithless and despairing I am, to let my heart go out to the love and
goodness round me, for fear of losing it all, for fear that those souls
I love may be withdrawn from me or I from them. In this I know that I
am sadly and darkly wrong--the prudent coldness, the fear of sorrow
pulls me back; irresolute, cowardly, base! Yet even so I must trust the
Hand that moulded me, and the Will that bade me be, just so and not
otherwise.

June 4, 1889.

It is a melancholy reflection how very little the highest and most
elaborate culture effects in the direction of producing creative and
original writing. Very few indeed of our great writers have been
technically cultivated men. How little we look to the Universities,
where a lifetime devoted to the study of the nuances of classical
expression is considered well spent, for any literature which either
raises the intellectual temperature or enriches the blood of the world!
The fact is that the highly-cultivated man tends to find himself
mentally hampered by his cultivation, to wade in a