intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps
a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a
more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even
comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies that the
realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street,
that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By
such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I
have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those
very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most
heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence
of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost
the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There
are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited,
as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can we fall back? The
very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour
of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the
others that they are subjectively dead to us. It is just as though a
farmer should plant all his fields in potatoes, instead of varying them
with grain and pasture; and so, when the disease comes, lose all his
harvest, while his neighbours, perhaps, may balance the profit and the
loss. Do not suppose that I am exaggerating when I talk about all
pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything
is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy
is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. I
can no longer see satyrs in the thicket, or picture a highwayman riding
down the lane. The fiat of indifference has gone forth: I am vacant,
unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental
drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more
subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary's drug; but it has a
sting of its own, and leaves me as flat and helpless as does the other.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] The quotation here promised from one of the author's own early
dramatic efforts (a tragedy of Semiramis) is not supplied in the
MS.--[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.]

[38] "The old pythoness was right," adds the author in a note appended
to his MS. in 1887; "I have been happy: I did go to America (am even