jection of the thought that touches one's elbow, bidding
one again and again arise and go, means something; to defer one's
pleasure, to break the languid dream, to take up the tiny task, what
strength is there! Thus no burden seems too heavy, too awkward, too
slippery, too ill-shaped, but one can lift it. The yoke is easy,
because one bears it in quiet confidence, not overtaxing ability or
straining hope. Instead of watching life, as from high castle windows,
feeling it common and unclean, not to be mingled with, I am in it and
of it. And what is become of all my old dreams of art, of the secluded
worship, the lonely rapture! Well, it is all there, somehow, flowing
inside life, like a stream that is added to a river, not like a leat
drawn aside from the current. The force I spent on art has gone to
swell life and augment it; it heightens perception, it intensifies
joy--it was the fevered lust of expression that drained the vigour of
my days and hours.

But am I then satisfied with the part I play? Do I feel that my
faculties are being used, that I am lending a hand to the great sum of
toil? I used to feel that, or thought I felt it, in the old days, but
now I see that I walked in a vain delusion, serving my own joy, my own
self-importance. Not that I think my old toil all ill-spent; that was
my work before, as surely as it is not now; but the old intentness, the
old watching for tone and gesture, for action and situation, that has
all shifted its gaze, and waits upon God. It may be, nay it is certain,
that I have far to go, much to learn; but now that I may perhaps
recover my strength, life spreads out into sunny shallows, moving slow
and clear. It is like a soft sweet interlude between two movements of
fire and glow; for I see now, what then I could not see, that something
in my life was burnt and shrivelled up in my enforced silence and in my
bitter loss--then, when I felt my energies at their lowest, when mind
and bodily frame alike flapped loose, like a flag of smut upon the bars
of a grate, I was living most intensely, and the soul's wings grew
fast, unfolding plume and feather. It was then that life burnt with its
fiercest heat, when it withdrew me, faintly struggling, away from all
that pleased and caressed the mind and the body, into the silent glow
of the furnace. Strange that I should not have perceived it! But now I
see in all maimed and broken lives, the lives that seem most idle and
helpless, most futile an