fore was the
phantom of delight; and though I still desired delight, with all the
passion of my poor frail nature, yet I saw that not thus could the real
joy of God be won. It was no longer a question of hope and
disappointment, of sin and punishment. It was something truer and
stronger than that. The sin and the suffering alike had been the Will
of God for me. I had never desired evil, though I had often fallen into
it; but there was never a moment when, if I could, I would not have
been pure and unselfish and strong. That was a blessed hour for me,
when, in place of the old luxurious delight, there came, flooding my
heart, an intense and passionate desire that I might accept with a
loving confidence whatever God might send; my wearied body, my tired,
anxious mind, were but a slender veil, rent and ruinous, that hung
between God and my soul, through which I could discern the glory of His
love.

June 20, 1891.

It was on a warm, bright summer afternoon that I woke to the sense both
of what I had lost and what I had gained. I had wandered out into the
country, for in those days I had a great desire to be alone. I stood
long beside a stile in the pastures, a little village below me, and the
gables and chimneys of an old farmhouse stood up over wide fields of
young waving wheat. A cuckoo fluted in an elm close by, and at the
sound there darted into my mind the memory, seen in an airy
perspective, of innumerable happy and careless days, spent in years
long past, with eager and light-hearted companions, in whose smiling
eyes and caressing motions was reflected one's own secret happiness.
How full the world seemed of sweet surprises then! To sit in an evening
hour in some quiet, scented garden in the gathering dusk, with the
sense of a delicious mystery flashing from the light movements, the
pensive eyes, the curve of arm or cheek of one's companion, how
beautiful that was! And yet how simple and natural it seemed. That was
all over and gone, and a gulf seemed fixed between those days and
these. And then there came first that sad and sweet regret, "the
passion of the past," as Tennyson called it, that suddenly brimmed the
eyes at the thought of the vanished days; and there followed an intense
desire to live in it once again, to have made more of it, a rebellious
longing to abandon oneself with a careless disregard to the old rapture.

Then on that mood, rising like a star into the blue spaces of the
evening, came the