thing it is!--has somehow contrived to discern that things are
amiss with me, and I can perceive that she tries all that her
little heart and mind can devise to please, soothe, interest me.
But I do not want to be ministered to, exquisite as the instinct is
in the child; and all the time I am as far off my object as ever. I
cannot work, I cannot think. I have said fine things in my books
about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling is
that I could bear any other kind of trial better. It seems to be
given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what should
most dishearten me.


"It would not school the shuddering will
To patience, were it sweet to bear,"


says an old poet; and it is true, I have no doubt; but, good God,
to think that a man, so richly dowered as I am with every
conceivable blessing, should yet have so small a reserve of faith
and patience! Even now I can frame epigrams about it. "To learn to
be content not to be content"--that is the secret--but meanwhile I
stumble in dark paths, through the grove nullo penetrabilis astro,
where men have wandered before now. It seems fine and romantic
enough, when one thinks of another soul in torment. One remembers
the old sage, reading quietly at a sunset hour, who had a sudden
vision of the fate that should befall him. His book falls from his
hands, he sits there, a beautiful and venerable figure enough,
staring heavily into the void. It makes me feel that I shall never
dare to draw the picture of a man in the grip of suffering again; I
have had so little of it in my life, and I have drawn it with a