recover the clue. The savour has gone out of life; I feel widowed,
frozen, desolate. How often have I tranquilly and good-humouredly
contemplated the time when I need write no more, when my work
should be done, when I should have said all I had to say, and could
take life as it came, soberly and wisely. Now that the end has come
of itself, I feel like a hopeless prisoner, with death the only
escape from a bitter and disconsolate solitude.

Can I not amuse myself with books, pictures, talk? No, because it
is all a purposeless passing of dreary hours. Before, there was
always an object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and
all the pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to
beguile the plodding path. Now I am adrift; I need go neither
forwards nor backwards; and the things which before were gentle and
quiet occupations have become duties to be drearily fulfilled.

I have put down here exactly what I feel. It is not cowardice that
makes me do it, but a desire to face the situation, exactly as it
is. Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit! And in any case nothing
can be done by blinking the truth. I shall need all my courage and
all my resolution to meet it, and I shall meet it as manfully as I
can. Yet the thought of meeting it thus has no inspiration in it.
My only desire is that the frozen mind may melt at the touch of
some genial ray, and that the buds may prick and unfold upon the
shrunken bough.



January 15, 1889.