To become what we sing.


It will be imagined that a man of this order would view my retreat from
London with disfavour. He thought me guilty of a kind of social
perfidy. No doubt the Earnest Good People, for whom I have the
greatest reverence, will agree in the same verdict. A letter received
during the last few days from my friend puts the case with such force,
and yet with such good-feeling, that I will transcribe a part of it.

'I confess,' he writes, 'that the pleasures of life among the mountains
leaves me cold. It is not that I am incapable of the same kind of
pleasure, but, as you know, I have other ideas concerning the uses of
life. I cannot enjoy sunsets while men and women are starving. The
thought of all the misery of life for multitudes would, as Rossetti
puts it, "make a goblin of the sun." You used to be very eloquent
against good men who lived only for their own pleasure; are not you
yourself living in the same way? I have heard you declaim against the
gross selfishness of Goethe's aim in life--"to build the pyramid of his
own intellectual culture"; are not you, in your own way, pursuing the
same ideal? I have heard you say that nothing so belittled Goethe in
your judgment as the fact that he was destitute of patriotism; he dwelt
at ease among his books, while his country perished and felt no pang;
and you live your joyous life among the hills, and have forgotten the
Golgothas on which the poor of London endure their unpitied martyrdom.
You are doing good to yourself, no doubt; but is it not a better thing
to be doing good to others? I marvel that you can sleep at peace amid
the wailing of the world. I cannot, and I thank God I cannot.

'What you do not seem to realise is that all our acts must be judged