be only too willing that I should thus have read and loved
them, and I cannot believe that the disapprobation of a few austere
people, or the curiosity of a few vulgar people, would weigh in the
balance for a moment against the joy of like-minded spirits.

The worst dissatisfaction of life is the difficulty one has in drawing
near to others, the foolish hardness, often only superficial, which
makes one hold back from and repudiate intimacies. If I had known and
loved a great and worthy spirit, and had been the recipient of his
confidences, I should hold it a solemn duty to tell the world what I
knew. I should care nothing for the carping of the cold and
unsympathetic, but I should base my decision on the approval of all
loving and generous souls. This seems to me the highest service that
art can render, and if it be said that no question of art comes in, in
the publication of such records as these letters, I would reply that
they are themselves works of the highest and most instinctive art,
because the world, its relations and affections, its loss and grief,
its pain and suffering, are here seen patiently mirrored and perfectly
expressed by a most perceptive personality. The moment that emotions
are depicted and represented, that moment they have felt the holy and
transfiguring power of art; and then they pass out of the region of
stuffy conventions and commonplace decorums into a finer and freer air.
I do not deny that there is much vulgar inquisitiveness abroad, but
that matters little; and, for myself, I am glad to think that the world
is moving in the direction of a greater frankness. I do not mean that a
man has not a right to live his life privately, in his own house and
his own circle, if he wills. But if that life is lived simply,
generously and bravely, I welcome any ripple or ray from it that breaks
in light and fragrance upon the harsher and uglier world.

July 1, 1889.

I have just read an interesting sentence. I don't know where it comes
from--I saw it in a book of extracts.

"I am more and more convinced that the cure for sentiment, as for all
weakened forms of strong things, is not to refuse to feel it, but to
feel more in it. This seems to me to make the whole difference between
a true and a false asceticism. The false goes for getting rid of what
it is afraid of; the true goes for using and making it serve, the one
empties, the other fills; the one abstracts, the other concentrates."

There is