one can round off the corners, repair mistakes, comfort, idealise,
smooth things down, make error and weakness bear good fruit,
choose, develop as one pleases. Not so with life, where things go
from bad to worse, misunderstandings grow and multiply, suffering
does not purge, sorrow does not uplift. That is the worst of
fiction, that it deludes one into thinking that one can deal gently
with life, finish off the picture, arrange things on one's own
little principles; and then, as in my own case, life brings one up
against some monstrous, grievous, intolerable fact, that one can
neither look round or over, and the scales fall from one's eyes.
With what courage, tranquillity or joy is one to meet a thoroughly
disagreeable situation? The more one leans on the hope that it may
amend, the weaker one grows; the thing to realise is that it is
bad, that it is inevitable, that it has arrived, and to let the
terror and misery do their worst, soak into the soul and not run
off it. Only then can one hope to be different; only so can one
climb the weary ladder of patience and faith.



March 28, 1889.


Low-hung ragged grey skies, heaven smeared with watery vapours
fleeting, broken and mournful, from the west--these above me, as I
stand by the old lichened gate of the high wind-swept field at the
top of the wold. In front a stretch of rough common, the dark-brown
heather, the young gorse, bluish-green, the rusty red of soaked
bracken, the pale ochre-coloured grass, all blent into a rich tint
that pleases the eye with its wild freshness. To the left, the wide