Part 12

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_ August 25, 1890.

Maud has been ailing of late--how much it is impossible to say, because she is always cheerful and indomitable. She never complains, she never neglects a duty; but I have found her, several times of late, sitting alone, unoccupied, musing--that is unlike her--and with a certain shadow upon her face that I do not recognise; but the strange, new, sweet companionship in which we live seems at the same time to have heightened and deepened. I seem to have lived so close to her all these years, and yet of late to have found a new and different personality in her, which I never suspected. Perhaps we have both changed somewhat; I do not feel the difference in myself. But there is something larger, stronger, deeper about Maud now, as if she had ascended into a purer air, and caught sight of some unexpected, undreamed-of distance; but instead of giving her remoteness, she seems to be sharing her wider outlook with me; she was never a great talker--perhaps it was that in old days my own mind ran like an ebullient fountain, evoking no definite response, needing no interchange; but she was always a sayer of penetrating things. She has a wonderful gift of seeing the firm issue through a cloud of mixed suggestions; but of late there has been a richness, a generosity, a wisdom about her which I have never recognised before. I think, with contrition, that I under-estimated, not her judgment or instinct, but her intellect. I am sure I lived too much in the intellectual region, and did not guess how little it really solves, in what a limited region it disports itself. I see that this wisdom was hers all along, and that I have been blind to it; but now that I have travelled out of the intellectual region, I perceive what a much greater thing that further wisdom is than I had thought. Living in art and for art, I used to believe that the intellectual structure was the one thing that mattered, but now I perceive dimly that the mind is but on the threshold of the soul, and that the artist may, nay does, often perceive, by virtue of his trained perception, what is going on in the sanctuary; but he is as one who kneels in a church at some great solemnity--he sees the movements and gestures of the priests; he sees the holy rite proceeding, he hears the sacred words; something of the inner spirit of it all flows out to him; but the viewless current of prayer, the fiery ray streaming down from God, that smites itself into the earthly symbol--all this is hidden from him. Those priests, intent upon the sacred work, feel something that they not only do not care to express, but which they would not if they could; it would be a profanation of the awful mystery. The artist is not profane in expressing what he perceives, because he can be the interpreter of the symbol to others more remote; but he is not a real partaker of the mystery; he is a seer of the word and not a doer. What now amazes me is that Maud, to whom the heart of the matter, the inner emotion, has always been so real, could fling herself, and all for love of me, into the outer work of intellectual expression. I have always, God forgive me, believed my work to be in some way superior to hers. I loved her truly, but with a certain condescension of mind, as one loves a child or a flower; and now I see that she has been serenely ahead of me all the time, and it has been she that has helped me along; I have been as the spoilt and wilful child, and she as the sweet and wise mother, who has listened to its prattle, and thrown herself, with all the infinite patience of love, into the tiny bounded dreams. I have told her all this as simply as I could, and though she deprecated it all generously and humbly, I feel the blessed sense of having caught her up upon the way, of seeing--how dimly and imperfectly!--what I have owed her all along. I am overwhelmed with a shame which it is a sweet pleasure to confess to her; and now that I can spare her a little, anticipate her wishes, save her trouble, it is an added joy; a service that I can render and which she loves to receive. I never thought of these things in the old days; she had always planned everything, arranged everything, forestalled everything.

I have at last persuaded her to come up to town and see a doctor. We plan to go abroad for a time. I would earn the means if I could, but, if not, we will sacrifice a little of our capital, and I will replace it, if I can, by some hack-work; though I have a dislike of being paid for my name and reputation, and not for my best work.

I am not exactly anxious; it is all so slight, what they call a want of tone, and she has been through so much; even so, my anxiety is conquered by the joy of being able to serve her a little; and that joy brings us together, hour by hour.

September 6, 1890.

Again the shadow comes down over my life. The doctor says plainly that Maud's heart is weak; but he adds that there is nothing organically wrong, though she must be content to live the life of an invalid for a time; he was reassuring and quiet; but I cannot keep a dread out of my mind, though Maud herself is more serene than she has been for a long time; she says that she was aware that she was somehow overtaxing herself, and it is a comfort to be bidden, in so many words, to abstain a little. We are to live quietly at home for a while, until she is stronger, and then we shall go abroad.

Maud does not come down in the mornings now, and she is forbidden to do more than take the shortest stroll. I read to her a good deal in the mornings; Maggie has proudly assumed the functions of housekeeper; the womanly instinct for these things is astonishing. A man would far sooner not have things comfortable, than have the trouble of providing them and seeing about them. Women do not care about comforts for themselves; they prefer haphazard meals, trays brought into rooms, vague arrangements; and yet they seem to know by instinct what a man likes, even though he does not express it, and though he would not take any trouble to secure it. What centuries of trained instincts must have gone to produce this. The new order has given me a great deal more of Maggie's society. We are sent out in the afternoon, because Maud likes to be quite alone to receive the neighbours, small and great, that come to see her, now that she cannot go to see them. She tells me frankly that my presence only embarrasses them. And thus another joy has come to me, one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me in my life, and which I can hardly find words to express--the contact with, the free sight of the mind and soul of an absolutely pure, simple and ingenuous girl. Maggie's mind has opened like a flower. She talks to me with perfect openness of all she feels and thinks; to walk thus, hour by hour, with my child's arm through my own, her wide-opened, beautiful eyes looking in mine, her light step beside me, with all her pretty caressing ways--it seems to me a taste of the purest and sweetest love I have ever felt. It is like the rapture of a lover, but without any shadow of the desirous element that mingles so fiercely and thirstily with our mortal loves, to find myself dear to her. I have a poignant hunger of the heart to save her from any touch of pain, to smooth her path for her, to surround her with beauty and sweetness. I did not guess that the world held any love quite like this; there seems no touch of selfishness about it; my love lavishes itself, asking for nothing in return, except that I may be dear to her as she to me.

Her fancies, her hopes, her dreams--how inexplicable, how adorable! She said to me to-day that she could never marry, and that it was a real pity that she could not have children of her own without. "We don't want any one else, do we, except just some little children to amuse us." She is a highly imaginative child, and one of our amusements is to tell each other long, interminable tales of the adventures of a family we call the Pickfords. I have lost all count of their names and ages, their comings and goings; but Maggie never makes a mistake about them, and they seem to her like real people; and when I sometimes plunge them into disaster, she is so deeply affected that the disasters have all to be softly repaired. The Pickfords must have had a very happy life; the kind of life that people created and watched over by a tender, patient and detailed Providence might live. How different from the real world!

But I don't want Maggie to live in the real world yet awhile. It will all come pouring in upon her, sorrow, anxiety, weariness, no doubt--alas that it should be so! Perhaps some people would blame me, would say that more discipline would be bracing, wholesome, preparatory. But I don't believe that. I had far rather that she learnt that life was tender, gentle and sweet--and then if she has to face trouble, she will have the strength of feeling that the tenderness, gentleness and sweetness are the real stuff of life, waiting for her behind the cloud. I don't want to disillusion her; I want to establish her faith in happiness and love, so that it cannot be shaken. That is a better philosophy, when all is said and done, than the stoical fortitude that anticipates dreariness, that draws the shadow over the sun, that overvalues endurance. One endures by instinct; but one must be trained to love.

February 6, 1891.

It is months since I have opened this book; it has lain on my table all through the dreadful hours--I write the word down conventionally, and yet it is not the right word at all, because I have merely been stunned and numbed. I simply could not suffer any more. I smiled to myself, as the man in the story, who was broken on the wheel, smiled when they struck the second and the third blow. I knew why he smiled; it was because he had dreaded it so much, and when it came there was nothing to dread, because he simply did not feel it.

To-night I just pick up idly the dropped thread. Perhaps it is a sign, this faint desire to make a little record, of the first tingling of returning life. Something stirs in me, and I will not resist it; it may be read by some one that comes after me, by some one perhaps who feels that his own grief is supreme and unique, and that no one has ever suffered so before. He may learn that there have been others in the dark valley before him, that the mist is full of pilgrims stumbling on, falling, rising again, falling again, lying stupefied in a silence which is neither endurance nor patience.

Maud was taken from me first; she went without a word or a sign. She was better that day, she declared, than she had felt for some time; she was on the upward grade. She walked a few hundred yards with Maggie and myself, and then she went back; the last sight I had of her alive was when she stood at the corner and waved her hand to us as we went out of sight. I am glad I looked round and saw her smile. I had not the smallest or faintest premonition of what was coming; indeed, I was lighter of mood than I had been for some time. We came in; we were told that she was tired and had gone up to lie down. As she did not come down to tea, I went up and found her lying on her bed, her head upon her hand--dead. The absolute peace and stillness of her attitude showed us that she had herself felt no access of pain. She had lain down to rest, and she had rested indeed. Even at my worst and loneliest, I have been able to be glad that it was even so. If I could know that I should die thus in joy and tranquillity, it would be a great load off my mind.

But the grief, the shock to Maggie was too much for my dear, love-nurtured child. A sort of awful and desperate strength came on me after that; I felt somehow, day by day, that I must just put away my own grief till a quiet hour, in order that I might sustain and guard the child; but her heart was broken, I think, though they say that no one dies of sorrow. She lay long ill--so utterly frail, so appealing in her grief, that I could think of nothing but saving her. Was it a kind of selfishness that needed to be broken down in me? Perhaps it was! Every single tendril of my heart seemed to grow round the child and clasp her close; she was all that I had left, and in some strange way she seemed to be all that I had lost too. And then she faded out of life, not knowing that she was fading, but simply too tired to live; and my desire alone seemed to keep her with me. Till at last, seeing her weariness and weakness, I let my desire go; I yielded, I gave her to God, and He took her, as though He had waited for my consent.

And now that I am alone, I will say, with such honesty as I can muster, that I have no touch of self-pity, no rebellion. It is all too deep and dark for that. I am not strong enough even to wish to die; I have no wishes, no desires at all. The three seem for ever about me, in my thoughts and in my dreams. When Alec died, I used to wake up to the fact, day after day, with a trembling dismay. Now it is not like that. I can give no account of what I do. The smallest things about me seem to take up my mind. I can sit for an hour by the hearth, neither reading nor thinking, just watching the flame flicker over the coals, or the red heart of the fire eating its way upwards and outwards. I can sit on a sunshiny morning in the garden, merely watching with a strange intentness what goes on about me, the uncrumpling leaf, the snowdrop pushing from the mould, the thrush searching the lawn, the robin slipping from bough to bough, the shapes of the clouds, the dying ray. I seem to have no motive either to live or to die. I retrace in memory my walks with Maggie, I can see her floating hair, and how she leaned to me; I can sit, as I used to sit reading by Maud's side, and see her face changing as the book's mood changed, her clear eye, her strong delicate hands. I seem as if I had awaked from a long and beautiful dream. People sometimes come and see me, and I can see the pity in their faces and voices; I can see it in the anxious care with which my good servants surround me; but I feel that it is half disingenuous in me to accept it, because I need no pity. Perhaps there is something left for me to do in the world: there seems no reason otherwise why I should linger here.

Mr. ---- has been very good to me; I have seen him almost daily. He seems the only person who perfectly understands. He has hardly said a word to me about my sorrow. He said once that he should not speak of it; before, he said, I was like a boy learning a lesson with the help of another boy, but that now I was being taught by the Master Himself. That may be so; but the Master has a very scared and dull pupil, alas, who cannot even discern the letters. I care nothing whether God be pleased or displeased; I bear His will, without either pain or resistance. I simply feel as if there had been some vast and overwhelming mistake somewhere; a mistake so incredible and inconceivable that nothing else mattered; as if--I do not speak profanely--God Himself were appalled at what He had done, and dared not smite further one whom He had stunned into silence and apathy.

With Mr. ---- I talk; he talks of simple, quiet things, of old books and thoughts. He tells me, sometimes, when I am too weary to speak, long, beautiful, quiet stories of his younger days, and I listen like a child to his grave voice, only sorry when it comes to an end. So the days pass, and I will not say I have no pleasure in them, because I have won back a sort of odd childish pleasure in small incidents, sights, and sounds. The part of me that can feel seems to have been simply cut gently away, and I live in the hour, just glad when the sun is out, sorry when it is dull and cheerless.

I read the other day one of my old books, and I could not believe it was mine. It seemed like the voice of some one I had once known long ago, in a golden hour. I was amused and surprised at my own quickness and inventiveness, at the confidence with which I interpreted everything so glibly and easily. I cannot interpret any more, and I do not seem to desire to do so. I seem to wait, with a half-amused smile, to see if God can make anything out of the strange tangle of things, as a child peers in within a scaffolding, and sees nothing but a forest of poles, little rising walls of chambers, a crane swinging weights to and fro. What can ever come, he thinks, out of such strange confusion, such fruitless hurry?

Well, I will not write any more; a sense of weariness and futility comes over me. I will go back to my garden to see what I can see, only dumbly and mutely thankful that it is not required of me to perform any dull and monotonous task, which would interrupt my idle dreams.

February 8, 1891.

I tried this morning to look through some of the old letters and papers in Maud's cabinet. There were my own letters, carefully tied up with a ribbon; letters from her mother and father; from the children when we were away from them. I began to read, and was seized with a sharp, unreasoning pain, surprised by sudden tears. I seemed dumbly to resent this, and I put them all away again. Why should I disturb myself to no purpose? "There shall be no more sorrow nor crying, for the former things are passed away"--so runs the old verse, and I had almost grown to feel like that. Why distrust it? Yet I could not forbear. I got the papers out again, and read late into the night, like one reading an old and beautiful story. Suddenly the curtain lifted, and I saw myself alone, I saw what I had lost. The ineffectual agony I endured, crying out for very loneliness! "That was all mine," said the melting heart, so long frozen and dumb. Grief, in waves and billows, began to beat upon me like breakers on a rock-bound shore. A strange fever of the spirit came on me, scenes and figures out of the years floating fiercely and boldly past me. Was my strength and life sustained for this, that I should just sleep awhile, and wake to fall into the pit of suffering, far deeper than before?

If they could but come back to me for a moment; if I could feel Maud's cheek by mine, or Maggie's arms round my neck; if they could but stand by me smiling, in robes of light! Yet as in a vision I seem to see them leaning from a window, in a blank castle-wall rising from a misty abyss, scanning a little stairway that rises out of the clinging fog, built up through the rocks and ending in a postern gate in the castle-wall. Upon that stairway, one by one emerging from the mist, seem to stagger and climb the figures of men, entering in, one by one, and the three, with smiles and arms interlaced, are watching eagerly. Cannot I climb the stair? Perhaps even now I am close below them, where the mist hangs damp on rock and blade? Cannot I set myself free? No, I could not look them in the face, they would hide their eyes from me, if I came in hurried flight, in passionate cowardice. Not so must I come before them, if indeed they wait for me.

The morning was coming in about the dewy garden, the birds piping faint in thicket and bush, when I stumbled slowly, dizzied and helpless, to my bed. Then a troubled sleep; and ah, the bitter waking; for at last I knew what I had lost.

February 10, 1891.

"All things become plain to us," said the good vicar, pulling on his gloves, "when we once realise that God is love--Perfect Love!" He said good-bye; he trudged off to his tea, a trying visit manfully accomplished, leaving me alone.

He had sate with me, good, kindly man, for twenty minutes. There were tears in his eyes, and I valued that little sign of human fellowship more than all the commonplaces he courageously enunciated. He talked in a soft, low tone, as if I was ill. He made no allusions to mundane things; and I am grateful to him for coming. He had dreaded his call, I am sure, and he had done it from a mixture of affection and duty, both good things.

"Perfect Love, yes--if we could feel that!" I sate musing in my chair.

I saw, as in a picture, a child brought up in a beautiful and stately house by a grave strong man, who lavished at first love and tenderness, ease and beauty, on the child, laughing with him, and making much of him; all of which the child took unconsciously, unthinkingly, knowing nothing different; running to meet his guardian, glad to be with him, sorry to leave him.

Then I saw in my parable that one day, when the child played in the garden, as he had often played before, he noticed a little green alley, with a pleasant arch of foliage, that he had never seen before, leading to some secluded place. The child was dimly aware that there were parts of the garden where he was supposed not to go; he had been told he must not go too far from the house, but it was all vague and indistinct in his mind; he had never been shown anything precisely, or told the limits of his wanderings. So he went in joy, with a sense of a sweet mystery, down the alley, and presently found himself in a still brighter and more beautiful garden, full of fruits growing on the ground and on the trees, which he plucked and ate. There was a building, like a pavilion, at the end, of two storeys; and while he wandered thither with his hands full of fruits, he suddenly saw his guardian watching him, with a look he had never seen on his face before, from the upper windows of the garden-house. His first impulse was to run to him, share his joy with him, and ask him why he had not been shown the delicious place; but the fixed and inscrutable look on his guardian's face, neither smiling nor frowning, the stillness of his attitude, first chilled the child and then dismayed him; he flung the fruits on the ground and shivered, and then ran out of the garden. In the evening, when he was with his guardian, he found him as kind and tender as ever. But his guardian said nothing to him about the inner garden of fruits, and the child feared to ask him.

But the next day he felt as though the fruits had given him a new eagerness, a new strength; he hankered after them long, and at last went down the green path again; this time the summer-house seemed empty. So he ate his fill, and this he did for many days. Then one day, when he was bending down to pluck a golden fruit, that lay gem-like on the ground among green leaves, he heard a sudden step behind him, and turning, saw his guardian draw swiftly near, with a look of anger on his face; the next instant he was struck down, again and again; lifted from the ground at last, as in a passion of rage, and flung down bleeding on the earth; and then, without a word, his guardian left him; at first he lay and moaned, but then he crawled away, and back to the house. And there he found the old nurse that tended him, who greeted him with tears and words of comfort, and cared for his hurts. And he asked her the reason of his hard usage, but she could tell him nothing, only saying that it was the master's will, and that he sometimes did thus, though she thought he was merciful at heart.

The child lay sick many days, his guardian still coming to him and sitting with him, with gentle talk and tender offices, till the scene in the garden was like an evil dream; but as his guardian spoke no word of displeasure to the child, the child still feared to ask him, and only strove to forget. And then at last he was well enough to go out a little; but a few days after--he avoided the inner garden now out of a sort of horror--he was sitting in the sun, near the house, feebly trying to amuse himself with one of his old games--how poor they seemed after the fruits of the inner paradise, how he hankered desirously after the further place, with its hot, sweet, fragrant scents, its rich juices!--when again his guardian came upon him in a sudden wrath, and struck him many times, dashing him down to the ground; and again he crept home, and lay long ill, and again his guardian was unwearyingly kind; but now a sort of horror of the man grew up in the mind of the child, and he feared that his strange anger might break out at any moment in a storm of blows.

And at last he was well again; and had half forgotten, in the constant kindness, and even merriment, of his guardian, the horror of the two assaults. He was out and about again; he still shunned the paradise of fruits, but wearying of the accustomed pleasaunce, he went further and passed into the wood; how cool and mysterious it was among the great branching trees! the forest led him onwards; now the sun lay softly upon it, and a stream bickered through a glade, and now the path lay through thickets, which hid the further woodland from view; and now passing out into a more open space, he had a thrill of joy and excitement; there was a herd of strange living creatures grazing there, great deer with branching horns; they moved slowly forwards, cropping the grass, and the child was lost in wonder at the sight. Presently one of them stopped feeding, began to sniff the air, and then looking round, espied the child, and began slowly to approach him. The child had no terror of the great dappled stag, and held out his hand to him, when the great beast suddenly bent his head down, and was upon him with one bound, striking him with his horns, lifting him up, smiting him with his pointed hooves. Presently the child, in his terror and faintness, became aware that the beast had left him, and he began to drag himself, all bruised as he was, along the glade; then he suddenly saw his guardian approaching, and cried out to him, holding out his hands for help and comfort--and his guardian strode straight up to him, and, with the same fierce anger in his face, struck at him again and again, and spurned him with his feet. And then, when he left him, the child at last, with accesses of deadly faintness and pain, crept back home, to be again tended by the old nurse, who wept over him; and the child found that his guardian came to visit him, as kind and gentle as ever. And at last one day when he sate beside the child, holding his hand, stroking his hair, and telling him an old tale to comfort him, the child summoned up courage to ask him a question about the garden and the wood; but at the first word his guardian dropped his hand, and left him without a word.

And then the child lay and mused with fierce and rebellious thoughts. He said to himself, "If my guardian had told me where I might not go; if he had said to me, 'in the inner garden are unwholesome fruits, and in the wood are savage beasts; and though I am strong and powerful, yet I have not strength to root up the poisonous plants and make the place a wilderness; and I cannot put a fence about it, or a fence about the wood, that no one should enter; but I warn you that you must not enter, and I entreat you for the love I bear you not to go thither,'" then the child thought that he would not have made question, but would have obeyed him willingly; and again he thought that, if he had indeed ventured in, and had eaten of the evil fruits, and been wounded by the savage stag, yet if his guardian had comforted him, and prayed him lovingly not to enter to his hurt, that then he would have loved his guardian more abundantly and carefully. And he thought too that, if his guardian had ever smitten him in wrath, and had then said to him with tears that it had grieved him bitterly to hurt him, but that thus and thus only could he learn the vileness of the place, then he would have not only forgiven the ill-usage, but would even have loved to endure it patiently. But what the child could not understand was that his guardian should now be tender and gracious, and at another time hard and cruel, explaining nothing to him. And thus the child said in himself, "I am in his power, and he must do his will upon me; but I neither trust nor love him, for I cannot see the reason of what he does; though if he would but tell me the reason, I could obey him and submit to him joyfully." These hard thoughts he nourished and fed upon; and his guardian came no more to him for good or for evil; and the child, much broken by his hard usage and his angry thoughts, crept about neglected and spiritless, with nothing but fear and dismay in his heart.

So the imagination shaped itself in my mind, a parable of the sad, strange life of man.

"Perfect Love!" If it were indeed that? Yet God does many things to His frail children, which if a man did, I could not believe him to be loving; though if He would but give us the assurance that it was all leading us to happiness, we could endure His fiercest stroke, His bitterest decree. But He smites us, and departs; He turns away in a rage, because we have broken a law that we knew not of. And again, when we seem most tranquil and blest, most inclined to trust Him utterly, He smites us down again without a word. I hope, I yearn to see that it all comes from some great and perfect will, a will with qualities of which what we know as mercy, justice, and love are but faint shadows--but that is hidden from me. We cannot escape, we must bear what God lays upon us. We may fling ourselves into bitter and dark rebellion; still He spares us or strikes us, gives us sorrow or delight. My one hope is to cooperate with Him, to accept the chastening joyfully and courageously. Then He takes from me joy, and courage alike, till I know not whom I serve, a Father or a tyrant. Can it indeed help us to doubt whether He be tyrant or no? Again I know not, and again I sicken in fruitless despair, like one caught in a great labyrinth of crags and precipices.

February 14, 1891.

Then the Christian teacher says: "God has given you a will, an independent will to act and choose; put it in unison with His will." Alas, I know not how much of my seeming liberty is His or mine. He seems to make me able to exert my will in some directions, able to make it effective; and yet in other matters, even though I see that a course is holy and beautiful, I have no power to follow it at all. I see men some more, some less hampered than myself. Some seem to have no desire for good, no dim perception of it. The outcast child, brought up cruelly and foully, with vile inheritances, he is not free, as I use the word; sometimes, by some inner purity and strength, he struggles upwards; most often he is engulfed; yet it is all a free gift, to me much, to another little, to some nothing at all. With all my heart do I wish my will to be in harmony with His. I yield it up utterly to Him. I have no strength or force, and He withholds them from me. I do not blame, I only ask to understand; He has given me understanding, and has put in my heart a high dream of justice and love; why will He not show me that He satisfies the dream? I say with the old Psalmist, "Lo, I come," but He comes not forth to meet me; He does not even seem to discern me when I am yet a long way off, as the father in the parable discerned his erring son.

Then the Christian teacher says to me that all is revealed in Christ; that He reconciles, not an angry God to a wilful world, but a grieved and outraged world to a God who cannot show them He is love.

Yet Christ said that God was all-merciful and all-loving, and that He ordered the very falling of a single hair of our heads. But if God ordered that, then He did not leave unordered the qualities of our hearts and wills, and our very sins are of His devising.

No, it is all dark and desperate; I do not know, I cannot know; I shall stumble to my end in ignorance; sometimes glad when a gleam of sunshine falls on my wearied limbs, sometimes wrapping my garments around me in cold and drenching rain. I am in the hand of God; I know that; and I hope that I may dare to trust Him; but my confidence is shaken as He passes over me, as the reed in the river shakes in the wind.

February 18, 1891.

A still February day, with a warm, steady sun, which stole in and caressed me, enveloping me in light and warmth, as I sate reading this morning. If I could be ashamed of anything, I should be ashamed of the fact that my body has all day long surprised me by a sort of indolent contentment, repeating over and over that it is glad to be alive. The mind and soul crave for death and silence. Yet all the while my faithful and useful friend, the body, seems to croon a low song of delight. That is the worst of it, that I seem built for many years of life. Shall I learn to forget?

I walked long and far among the fields, in the fresh, sun-warmed air. Ah! the sweet world! Everything was at its barest and austerest--the grass thin in the pastures, the copses leafless. But such a sense of hidden life everywhere! I stood long beside the gate to watch the new-born lambs, whose cries thrilled plaintively on the air, like the notes of a violin. Little black-faced grey creatures, on their high, stilt-like legs--a week or two old, and yet able to walk, to gambol, to rejoice, in their way, to reflect. The bleating mothers moved about, divided between a deep desire to eat, and the anxious care of their younglings. One of them stood over her sleeping lamb, stamping her feet, to dismay me, no doubt, while the little creature lay like a folded door-mat on the pasture. Another brutally repelled the advances of a strange lamb, butting it over whenever it drew near; another chewed the cud, while its lamb sucked, its eyes half closed in contented joy, just turning from time to time to sniff at the little creature pressed close to its side. I felt as if I had never seen the sight before, this wonderful and amazing drama of life, beginning again year after year, the same, yet not the same.

The old shepherd came out with his crook, said a few words to me, and moved off, the ewes following him, the lambs skipping behind. "He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort." How perfectly beautiful and tender the image, a thing seen how many hundred years ago on the hills of Bethlehem, and touching the old heart just as it touches me to-day!

And yet, alas, to me to-day the image seems to miss the one thing needful; how all the images of guide and guardian and shepherd fail when applied to God! For here the shepherd is but a little wiser, a little stronger than his flock. He sees their difficulties, he feels them himself. But with God, He is at once the Guide, and the Creator of the very dangers past which He would lead us. If we felt that God Himself were dismayed and sad in the presence of evils that He could not touch or remedy, we should turn to Him to help us as He best could. But while we feel that the very perplexities and sufferings come from His hand, how can we sincerely ask Him to guard us from things which He originates, or at least permits? Why should they be there at all, if His concern is to help us past them; or how can we think that He will lead us past them, when they are part of His wise and awful design?

And thus one plunges again into the darkness. Can it indeed be that God, if He be all-embracing, all-loving, all-powerful, can create or allow to arise within Himself something that is not, Himself, alien to Him, hostile to Him? How can we believe in Him and trust Him, if this indeed be so?

And yet, looking upon that little flock to-day, I did indeed feel the presence of a kind and fatherly heart, of something that grieved for my pain, and that laid a hand upon my shoulder, saying, "Son, endure for a little; be not so disquieted!"

March 8, 1891.

Something--far-off, faint, joyful--cried out suddenly in the depths of my spirit to-day. I felt--I can but express it by images, for it was too intangible for direct utterance--as a woman feels when her child's life quickens within her; as a traveller's heart leaps up when, lost among interminable hills, he is hailed by a friendly voice; as the river-water, thrust up into creeks and estuaries by the incoming tide, is suddenly freed by the ebb from that stealthy pressure, and flows gladly downwards; as the dark garden-ground may feel when the frozen soil melts under warm winds of spring, and the flower-roots begin to swell and shoot.

Some such thrill it was that moved in the silence of the soul, showing that the darkness was alive.

It came upon me as I walked among soft airs to-day. It was no bodily lightness that moved me, for I was unstrung, listless, indolent; but it was a sense that it was good to live, lonely and crushed as I was; that there was something waiting for me which deserved to be approached with a patient expectation--that life was enriched, rather than made desolate by my grief and losses; that I had treasure laid up in heaven. It came upon me as a fancy, but it was something better than that, that one or other of my dear ones had perhaps awaked in the other world, and had sent out a thought in search of me. I had often thought that if, when we are born into this world of ours, our first years are so dumb and unperceptive, it might be even so in the world beyond; that we are there allowed to rest a little, to sleep; and that has seemed to me to be perhaps the explanation why, in those first sad days of grief, when the mourner aches to have some communication with the vanished soul, and when the soul that has passed the bounds of life would be desiring too, one would think, to send some message back, why, I say, there is no voice nor hint nor sign. Perhaps the reason why our grief loses its sting after a season is that the soul we have loved does contrive to send some healing influence into the desolate heart.

I know not; but as I stood upon the hill-top to-day at evening, the setting sun gilding the cloud-edges, and touching the horizon with a delicate misty azure, my spirit did indeed awake with a smile, with a murmured word of hope.

If I, who have lost everything that can enrich and gladden life, can yet feel that inalienable residue of hope, which just turns the balance on the side of desiring still to live, it must be that life has something yet in store for me--I do not hope for love, I do not desire the old gift of expression again; but there is something to learn, to apprehend, to understand. I have learnt, I think, not to grasp at anything, not to clasp anything close to my heart; the dream of possession has fled from me; it will be enough if, as I learn the lesson, I can ease a few burdens and help frail feet along the road. Duty, pleasure, work--strange names which we give to life, perversely separating the strands of the woven thread, they hold no meaning for me now--I do not expect to be free from suffering or from grief; but I will no more distinguish them from other experiences saying, this is joyful, and I will take all I can, or this is sad, and I will fly from it. I will take life whole, not divide it into pieces and choose. My grief shall be like a silent chapel, lit with holy light, into which I shall often enter, and bend, not to frame mechanical prayers, but to submit myself to the still influence of the shrine. It is all my own now, a place into which no other curious eye can penetrate, a guarded sanctuary. My sorrow seems to have plucked me with a strong hand out of the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes; and I see now that I could not have rescued myself; that I should have gone on battling with the current, catching at the river wrack, in the hopes of saving something from the stream. Now I am face to face with God; He saves me from myself, He strips my ragged vesture from me and I stand naked as He made me, unashamed, nestling close to His heart. _

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