write to you at greater length. It is not that I have less leisure than
usual, but I am going through a time when I am less sensible to the
beauty of things. I long for true wisdom. . . .


_December 12, 7 o'clock._

To-day, in spite of the changing beauty of sun and rain, I did not feel
alive to Nature. Yet never was there such grace and goodness in the
skies.

The landscape, with the little bridge and the man on horseback of which
I have told you, softened under the splendour of the clouds. But I had
lapsed from my former sense of the benediction of God, when suddenly
the beauty, all the beauty, of a certain tree spoke to my inmost heart.
It told me of fairness that never fails; of the greenness of ivy and the
redness of autumn, the rigidity of winter in the branches;--and then I
understood that an instant of such contemplation is the whole of life,
the very reward of existence, beside which all human expectation is
nothing but a bad dream.


_Sunday, December 13._

. . . After a refreshing night I walked to-day in these woods where for
three months the dead have strewn the ground. To-day the vanishing
autumn displayed its richness, and the same beauty of mossy trunks spoke
to me, as it did yesterday, of eternal joy.

I am sure it needs an enormous effort to feel all this, but it must be